If we define a miracle as an effect of which the cause is unknown to us, then we make our ignorance the source of miracles! And the universe itself would be a standing miracle. A miracle might be perhaps defined… — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
Miracles may be, for anything we know to the contrary, phenomena of a higher order of God's laws, superior to, and, under certain conditions, controlling the inferior order known to us as the ordinary laws of nature. — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
The whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery ... As soon as an Analytical Engine… — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
The economy of human time is the next advantage of machinery in manufactures. — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
The first steps in the path of discovery, and the first approximate measures, are those which add most to the existing knowledge of mankind. — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting… — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped, and contribute to… — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
A powerful attraction exists, therefore, to the promotion of a study and of duties of all others engrossing the time most completely, and which… — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
Science in England is not a profession: its cultivators are scarcely recognised even as a class. Our language itself contains no single term by which their occupation can be expressed. We borrow a foreign word [Savant] from another country whose high ambition it is to advance science, and whose deeper policy, in accord with more generous feelings, gives to the… — Charles Babbage Copy Share
Of Cooking. This is an art of various forms, the object of which is to give ordinary observations the appearance and character of those of the highest degree of accuracy. One of its numerous processes is to make multitudes of observations, and out of these to select only those which agree, or very nearly agree. If a hundred observations are… — Charles Babbage Copy Share
The quantity of meaning compressed into small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on… — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
Some kinds of nails, such as those used for defending the soles of coarse shoes, called hobnails, require a particular form of the head,… — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
That the state of knowledge in any country will exert a directive influence on the general system of instruction adopted in it, is a… — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
It can happen to but few philosophers, and but at distant intervals, to snatch a science, like Dalton, from the chaos of indefinite combination,… — Charles Babbage Copy Share Image
