Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
Interpretation
Exceptional observations can renew science by challenging established rules.
In this quote, William James emphasizes that while scientific knowledge often rests on established facts, it is the irregular and exceptional observations—often overlooked—that truly drive scientific advancement. By paying attention to these anomalies, scientists can develop new theories and formulas that reflect a more comprehensive understanding of reality, highlighting the importance of curiosity and open-mindedness in the scientific process.
In practice
In a research seminar, highlighting this quote can foster discussions about the importance of unusual findings in scientific inquiry.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense.
It takes so long to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.
The cross pollination of disciplines is fundamental to truly revolutionary advances in our culture.
[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].
The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
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