William Harvey Quotes

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Knowledge can only be got in one way, the way of experience; there is no other way to know.

Nothing can be found in the intellect if previously has not been found in the senses.

I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections; not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

Ultimately all knowing, from the highest to the lowest, is the result of experience; it arises on the way of experiences.

Gradually the conviction gained recognition that all knowledge about things is exclusively a working-over of the raw material furnished by the senses. ... Galileo and Hume first upheld this principle with full clarity and decisiveness.

For many ages it has been allowed by sensible men, Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu: That is, There is nothing in the understanding which was not first perceived by some of the senses. All the knowledge which we naturally have is originally derived from our senses. And therefore those who want any sense cannot have the least knowledge or idea of the objects of that sense; as they that never had sight have not the least knowledge or conception of light or colours.

Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.

I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation

All inferences from experience... are effects of custom, not of reasoning.

To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses.

We need only reflect on what has been prov'd at large, that we are never sensible of any connexion betwixt causes and effects, and that 'tis only by our experience of their constant conjunction, we can arrive at any knowledge of this relation.

Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses . . .

The ancient saying, "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses," and senses being explorers of the world, opens the way to knowledge.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

All our knowledge begins with the senses...

Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded.

Laboratories are useful, but reflection for us must always start from experience.

All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.

History is philosophy teaching by experience.

In one word, to draw the rule from experience, one must generalize; this is a necessity that imposes itself on the most circumspect observer.

All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions … In nature there is no effect without a cause … Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments … Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass.

The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.