William Whewell Quotes

The soul never thinks without a picture.

To see is to think, and to think is to see.

I think perception is important.

Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.

To understand something, whether we are aware of it or not, depends on choosing a model. We get to understand what we see by comparing it with something else, something that we think we understand better. But what we compare it with turns out to have a huge influence on the outcome.

It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

What a man sees depends on what he looks at and what his previous experience has taught him to see.

Comprehension follows perception.

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

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

Is there an observation which is not the instrument of thought?

The organ of perception acts more readily than judgment.

A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.

Remembering is part of thinking, but not all of it.

Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.

We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain.

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

Colour, Figure, Motion, Extension and the like, considered only so many Sensations in the Mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or Images, referred to Things or Archetypes existing without the Mind, then are we involved all in Scepticism.