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

Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.

What a fearful object a long-neglected duty gets to be

A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is directand simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.

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

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.

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