To see what is general in what is particular and what is permanent in what is transitory is the aim of scientific thought. (Intro.Math. p. 11)

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it. (C.N. p. 163)

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost. (A.E. p. 162)

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which it tacitly presupposes. (A.I. p. 197)

The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists today are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision, possessed by science. Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought. (S.M.W. pp. 14-5)

Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivate from medieval theology. (S.M.W. p. 19)

The scientists of the Renaissance and their immediate successors of the seventeenth century, to whom we owe our traditional concepts, inherited from Plato, Aristotle and the medieval scholastics. It is true that the New Learning reacted violently against the schoolmen who were their immediate predecessors: but, like the Israelites when they fled from Egypt, they borrowed their valuables - and in this case the valuables were certain root-presuppositions respecting space, time, matter, predicate and subject, and logic in general. (Princ. Rel. pp. 5-6)

The results of science are never quite true. By a healthy independence of thought per. haps we sometimes avoid adding other people's errors to our own. (A.E. p. 233)

Matter-of-fact is an abstraction, arrived at by confining thought to purely formal relations which then masquerade as the final reality. This is why science, in its perfection, relapses into the study of differential equations. The concrete world has slipped through the meshes of the scientific net. (M.T. p. 25)

There can be no true physical science which looks first to mathematics for the provision of a conceptual model. Such a procedure is to repeat the errors of the logicians of the middle ages. (Princ. Rel. p. 39)

Consider ... the scientific notion of measurement. Can we elucidate the turmoil of Europe by weighing its dictators, its prime ministers, and its editors of newspapers? The idea is absurd, although some relevant information might be obtained. I am not upholding the irrelevance of science. Such a doctrine would be foolish. For example, a daily record of the bodily temperatures of the men, above mentioned, might be useful. My point is the incompleteness of the information. (M.T. pp. 25-6)

Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes ... Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study. (F.R. p. 12)

Science is simply setting out on a fishing expedition to see whether it cannot find some procedure which it can call the measurement of space and some procedure which it can call the measurement of time, and something which it can call a system of forces, and something which it can call masses, so that these formulae may be satisfied. The only reason - on this theory - why anyone should want to satisfy these formulae is a sentimental regard for Galileo, Newton, Euler and Lagrange. The theory, so far from founding science on a sound observational basis, forces everything to conform to a mere mathematical preference for certain simple formulae. (C.N. pp. 139-40)

Science has always suffered from the vice of overstatement. 'In this way conclusions true within strict limitations have been generalised dogmatically into a fallacious universality (F.R. p. 22)

Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of its existing modes of knowledge. Sceptics and believers are all alike. At this moment scientists and sceptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. The Universe is vast. (Phil. Dewey p. 478)

A few generations ago the clergy, or to speak more accurately, large sections of the clergy were the standing examples of obscurantism. Today their place has been taken by scientists. (F.R. pp. 34-5)

A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions. This is the case with science. (S.M.W. p. 289)

(According to Locke) Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. (S.M.W. P. 80)

Unfortunately in this book of nature the biologists fare badly. Every expression of life takes time. Nothing that is characteristic of life can manifest itself at an instant. Murder is a prerequisite for the absorption of biology into physics as expressed in these traditional concepts. (Symposium: Time, Space and Material, Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume Il, p. 45)

On the absolute theory, bare space and bare time are such very odd existences, half something and half nothing. They always remind me of Milton's account of the Creation, with the forepaws of the lions already created and their hinderquarters still unfinished -

"The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, ......"

It seems so much simpler to sweep all this odd assortment of existences into the mind; and then all their contents have to follow them into the same dustbin as being nothing else than the outcome of the diseased mentality of existence. (Discussion: The Idealistic Interpretations of Einstein's Theory, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, N.S. Vol. XXII, p. 131)

The independence ascribed to bodily substances carried them away from the realm of values altogether. They degenerated into a mechanism entirely valueless, except as suggestive of an external ingenuity. (S.M.W. p. 280)

His cosmology (Newton's) is very easy to understand and very hard to believe. (A.I. p. 168)

In the present-day reconstruction of physics, fragments of the Newtonian concepts are stubbornly retained. The result is to reduce modern physics to a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible Universe. (M.T. p. 185)

(Physics- refers to ether, electrons, molecules, intrinsically incapable of direct observation.) On this theory we must entirely separate psychological time, space, external perceptions, and bodily feelings from the scientific world of molecular interaction. This strange world of science dwells apart like the gods of Epicurus, except that it has the peculiar property of inducing our minds to play upon us the familiar antics of our senses. (Princ. Rel. p. 62)

The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics? The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle's successors. In some respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the knowledge of the seventeenth century to be formulated so far as physics and chemistry were concerned, with a completeness which lasted to the present time. But the progress of biology and psychology has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths. If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations. (S.M.W. 24-5)

The doctrine of evolution. . . . interprets the vanishing of species and of sporadically variant individuals, as being due to maladjustment to the environment. This explanation has its measure of truth: it is one of the great generalisations of science. But enthusiasts have so strained its interpretation as to make it explain nothing, by reason of the f act that it explains everything. We hardly ever know the definite character of the struggle which occasioned the disappearance. The phrase is like the liturgical refrain of 'a litany, chanted over the fossils of vanished species. (F.R. pp. 3-4)

Judgments of worth are no part of the texture of physical science, but they are part of the motive of its production. Mankind has raised the edifice of science, because they have judged it worth while. In other words, the motives involve innumerable judgments of value. Again, there has been conscious selection of the parts of the scientific field to be cultivated, and this conscious selection involves judgments of value. These values may be aesthetic, or moral, or utilitarian, namely, judgments as to the beauty of the structure, or as to the duty of exploring the truth, or as to utility in the satisfaction of physical wants. But whatever the motive, without judgments of value there would have been no science. (A.E. pp. 228-9)

(Whitehead's approval of the spirit of science.) When Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained. (S.M.W. p. 270)