It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
Interpretation
Believing things without enough evidence is universally incorrect.
This quote emphasizes the importance of rational thinking and evidence-based beliefs. It argues that accepting ideas or truths without sufficient evidence undermines the integrity of knowledge and understanding, and suggests that this principle is applicable universally, regardless of context or individual.
In practice
Introducing a discussion on the importance of critical thinking in a classroom setting.
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.
Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.
I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.
If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
It seems the more I think about not sinning, the more I sin, but the more I think about just loving Jesus, the less I seem to sin. Falling in love seems to be the key.
If thou wouldst be justified, acknowledge thine injustice. He that confesses his sin, begins his journey toward salvation. He that is sorry for it, mends his pace. He that forsakes it, is at his journey's end.
It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.
In many ways, astrology, numerology and palmistry are corruptions of the occult because they have attempted to make a practice out of something that is essentially imaginative.
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