Science Quotes by William James

The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

— William James

Man lives for science as well as bread.

— William James

“Psychology is the science of mental life”

— William James

'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

— William James

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

— William James

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

— William James

I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.

— William James

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together…

— William James

We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.

— William James

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

— William James

The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

— William James

“In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.”

— William James

...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions…

— William James

The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the…

— William James

We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given…

— William James

The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail…

— William James

“the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively triumphant…

— William James

I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain…

— William James

Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are…

— William James

Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably…

— William James

We [may] answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"-in…

— William James

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences…

— William James

Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as…

— William James

(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch…

— William James

When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of…

— William James

Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived…

— William James

“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us,…

— William James

The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus…

— William James

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against…

— William James

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than…

— William James

Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we…

— William James

Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence,…

— William James

Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she…

— William James

A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it…

— William James

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the…

— William James

The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The…

— William James

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be…

— William James

The greatest discovery of the 19th century was not in the realm of the physical sciences, but the power of the subconscious…

— William James