The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.