Science (n.) brought with it a reaction against dreams: physicians began to call their mental activity trivial, while philosophers and amateurs, closer to popular feeling, kept faith in their value.
Science (n.) has Darwin's golden rule: write down at once every fact against your theory, for such facts escape the memory far more readily than favourable ones.
Science (n.) is a deflection — Voltaire's garden, cultivated to make light of our misery.
Science (n.) is the only road to knowledge of reality outside ourselves.
Science (n.) is no illusion; the illusion would be thinking we could get elsewhere what science cannot give.
Science (n.) is blamed for how little it has taught us, by people who forget how young it is; we should take the geologists as our pattern.
Science (n.) changes by development, not revolution: an old law turns out to be a special case of a wider uniformity, a rough approximation gives way to a finer one.
Science (n.) has many open enemies and more secret ones, who cannot forgive her for weakening religious faith.
Science (n.) corresponds to maturity: the individual who has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted to reality and turned to the outside world for the objects of his desires.
Science (n.) begins only once it is realized that the world is unknown; animism needed no such basis — primitive man knew what things were like, namely just as he felt himself to be.
Science (n.) loses her passionless impartiality in war: her embittered servants seek weapons in her — anthropologists declare the enemy degenerate, psychiatrists diagnose his disease of mind.
Science (n.) shows little confidence in itself if it thinks it cannot absorb whatever may turn out true in the claims of occultists.
Science (n.) is very young: Freud was already alive when Darwin published the Origin of Species, a blink beside the hundred thousand years of human evolution.
Science (n.) works like a sculptor at his clay model, tirelessly adding and taking away until the likeness satisfies — it does not stagger blindly from error to error.
Science (n.) is not a catechism of proved theses; only a passion for authority demands that, and it is a mark of scientific thinking to work on with approximations.
Science (n.) holds dreams in contempt as a reaction against the overvaluation of them in older times.
A Science (n.) that has something to offer need not beg for followers: its findings canvass for it, and it can wait.
Science (n.) cannot be organized by decree: a German officer banned lectures on the Oedipus complex at the front as an insult to fathers fighting for their country, and Freud doubted German science would respond well.
A Science (n.) can live a long time on vague basic concepts; instinct and nervous energy may stay as indeterminate as force and mass once were.
Science (n.) is not revelation: it long lacks the certainty and infallibility thought longs for, and it is all we can have.