Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.
Arthur EddingtonRead
We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that scientific progress is a rediscovery of natural truths rather than an invention of new ideas.
Arthur Eddington's quote highlights the notion that the advancements made in science do not create new knowledge but rather uncover truths that are already present in nature. It implies that the human mind, through science, effectively retrieves the wisdom and understanding that it originally contributed to nature, suggesting a deep connection between our intellectual pursuits and the natural world.
In practice
In a lecture about the relationship between science and the natural world, this quote can be highlighted to emphasize the connection.
Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.
The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.
It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.
Whatever else there may be in our nature, responsibility toward truth is one of its attributes.
In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. ... The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.
So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
What is this true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong, into one single koan.
Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.
Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
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