Let one persuade many, and he becomes confirmed and convinced, and cares for no better evidence.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

In the scale of life there is a gradual decline in physical variability, as the organism has gathered into itself resources for meeting the exigencies of changing external conditions; and that while in the mindless and motionless plant these resources are at a minimum, their maximum is reached in the mind of man, which, at length, rises to a level with the total order and powers of nature, and in its scientific comprehension of nature is a summary, an epitome of the world.

The accidental causes of science are only accidents relatively to the intelligence of a man.

If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent in science until its proceedings become systematic, or the truths already reached give direction to further research.

And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.

We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.