Auguste Comte Quotes

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

The deductive method is the mode of using knowledge, and the inductive method the mode of acquiring it.

My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'

The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but that which is based on observed facts. This is incontestable, in our present advanced stage; but, if we look back to the primitive stage of human knowledge, we shall see that it must have been otherwise

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

Intuition is for thinking what observation is for perception. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.

A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is directand simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.

[It's] troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.

The kind of knowledge which is supported only by observations and is not yet proved must be carefully distinguished from the truth; it is gained by induction, as we usually say. Yet we have seen cases in which mere induction led to error. Therefore, we should take great care not to accept as true such properties of the numbers which we have discovered by observation and which are supported by induction alone. Indeed, we should use such a discovery as an opportunity to investigate more exactly the properties discovered and to prove or disprove them; in both cases we may learn something useful.

The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.

Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible.

Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.

Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.

In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words.

We must reason in natural philosophy not from what we hope, or even expect, but from what we perceive.