Must Acknowledge, That To Act

There Is No Greater Impediment To The Advancement Of Knowledge Than The Ambiguity Of Words. To This Chiefly It Is Owing That We Find Sects And Parties In Most Branches Of Science [and Politics]; And Disputes That Are Carried On From Age To Age, Without Being Brought To Issue.

I Wanted To Be A Part Of The Downtown Renaissance.

We Find Sects And Parties In Most Branches Of Science; And Disputes Which Are Carried On From Age To Age, Without Being Brought To An Issue. Sophistry Has Been More Effectually Excluded From Mathematics And Natural Philosophy Than From Other Sciences. In Mathematics It Had No Place From The Beginning; Mathematicians Having Had The Wisdom To Define Accurately The Terms They Use, And To Lay Down, As Axioms, The First Principles On Which Their Reasoning Is Grounded. Accordingly, We Find No Parties Among Mathematicians, And Hardly Any Disputes.

The Wisdom Of God Exceeds That Of The Wisest Man, More Than His Wisdom Exceeds That Of A Child. If A Child Were To Conjecture How An Army Is To Be Formed In The Day Of Battle--how A City Is To Be Fortified, Or A State Governed--what Chance Has He To Guess Right? As Little Chance Has The Wisest Man When He Pretends To Conjecture How The Planets Move In Their Courses, How The Sea Ebbs And Flows, And How Our Minds Act Upon Our Bodies.

It Is Natural To Men To Judge Of Things Less Known, By Some Similitude They Observe, Or Think They Observe, Between Them And Things More Familiar Or Better Known. In Many Cases, We Have No Better Way Of Judging. And, Where The Things Compared Have Really A Great Similitude In Their Nature, When There Is Reason To Think That They Are Subject To The Same Laws, There May Be A Considerable Degree Of Probability In Conclusions Drawn From Analogy.