Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.
Interpretation
To foster creativity, one must observe nature carefully, reflect deeply, and conduct precise experiments.
Diderot emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive approach to understanding the natural world. He suggests that true creative genius arises from a combination of careful observation, deep reflection, and precise experimentation, which are often lacking in individuals. The rarity of such an integration highlights the exceptional nature of creative individuals who possess all three qualities.
In practice
In a lecture on scientific method, you could emphasize Diderot's quote to illustrate the importance of integrating observation, reflection, and experimentation in research.
The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.
This root [the potato], no matter how much you prepare it, is tasteless and floury. It cannot pass for an agreeable food, but it supplies a food sufficiently abundant and sufficiently healthy for men who ask only to sustain themselves. The potato is criticized with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisms of peasants and laborers?
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
In order to get as much fame as one's father one has to much more able than he.
All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.
The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
If you don't get a good night's sleep, the events of the day are not properly encoded in memory.
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.
Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws,' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.
The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
During my medical education at the University of Basle I found vivisection horrible, barbarous and above all unnecessary
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