William Kingdon Clifford Quotes
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.
Clifford, William Kingdon. "The Ethics of Belief." Lectures and Essays, edited by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock, vol. 2, Macmillan and Co., 1879, pp. 177-211.
One of the reasons that this quotation is so significant is that the Roman Catholic Church had been historically antithetical to science and scientists. It took hundreds of years before the church would admit that Galileo was right and the church wrong about the earth revolving around the sun. But Pope John Paul II, along with his other major accomplishments removed the traditional Catholic hostility in theology and tradition. He even acknowledged the validity of the Theory of Evolution and taught that there was nothing inherent in evolution that denied God or scripture.
William Kingdon Clifford FRS was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry. In his philosophical writings he coined the expression mind-stuff.
