Ernst Mach

Quotes

1. The function of science... is to replace experience. Thus, on the one hand, science must remain in the province of experience, but, on the other, must hasten beyond it, constantly expecting confirmation, constantly expecting the reverse. Where neither confirmation nor refutation is possible, science is not concerned. Science acts and only acts in the domain of uncompleted experience.

2. 

   Nature does not begin with elements, as we are obliged to begin with them. It is certainly fortunate... that we can, from time to time, turn aside our eyes from the over powering unity of the All, and allow them to rest on individual details. But we should not omit, ultimately, to complete and correct our views by a thorough consideration of the things which for the time being we left out of account.

3. 

   It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of the changes of things...

4. 

   It might be... that... motion is determined by a medium... In such a case we should have to substitute this medium for Newton's absolute space. ...[I]t is easily demonstrable that the atmosphere is not this motion-determinative medium. We should, therefore, have to picture to ourselves some other medium, filling, say, all space, with respect to... which... we have at present no adequate knowledge. In itself such a state of things would not belong to the impossibilities. It is known, from recent hydrodynamical investigations, that a rigid body experiences resistance in a frictionless fluid only when its velocity changes. ...[T]his result is derived theoretically from the notion of inertia; but it might... also be regarded as the primitive fact from which we... start. ...[W]e might... hope to learn more in the future concerning this hypothetical medium; and from the point of view of science it would be in every respect a more valuable acquisition than the forlorn idea of absolute space.

5. 

   [W]e are not restricted to any one definite measure, all being interconnected.

6. 

   Time... appears to be some particular and independent thing, on the progress of which the position of the pendulum depends, while the things that we resort to for comparison and choose at random appear to play a wholly collateral part.

7. 

   I have not in every case been able to avoid the use of the abbreviated and precise terminology of mathematics. To do so would have been to sacrifice matter to form; for the language of everyday life has not yet grown to be sufficiently accurate for the purposes of so exact a science as mechanics.

8. 

   But now, after a century has elapsed, after our judgment has grown more sober, the world-conception of the encyclopaedists appears to us as a mechanical mythology in contrast to the animistic of the old religions.

9. 

   Newton has... acted contrary to his expressed intention only to investigate actual facts. No one is competent to predicate things about absolute space and absolute motion; they are pure things of thought, pure mental constructs, that cannot be produced in experience. All our principles of mechanics are... experimental knowledge concerning the relative positions and motions of bodies. ...No one is warranted in extending these principles beyond the boundaries of experience. ...[S]uch an extension is meaningless, as no one possesses the requisite knowledge to make use of it.

10. 

    Physical science does not pretend to be a complete view of the world; it simply claims that it is working toward such a complete view in the future. The highest philosophy of the scientific investigator is... toleration of an incomplete conception of the world and the preference for it rather than an apparently perfect, but inadequate conception.

11. 

    Newton never, despite his profound religiosity, mingled theology with the questions of science. ...The same may be said of Galileo and Huygens.

12. 

    Regard for the true endeavor of philosophy, that of guiding into one common stream the many rills of knowledge, will not be found wanting in my work, although it takes a determined stand against the encroachments of metaphysical methods.