A Quote by William Gilbert
In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.
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Since nothing is so secret or hidden that it cannot be revealed, everything depends on the discovery of those things that manifest the hidden.
There was, I think, a feeling that the best science was that done in the simplest way. In experimental work, as in mathematics, there was "style" and a result obtained with simple equipment was more elegant than one obtained with complicated apparatus, just as a mathematical proof derived neatly was better than one involving laborious calculations. Rutherford's first disintegration experiment, and Chadwick's discovery of the neutron had a "style" that is different from that of experiments made with giant accelerators.
The experimentalists think that we can only get at our concepts by way of empirical investigation, while the armchair philosophers think that we can skip the experiments and figure things out from our armchairs. What they have in common, however, is regarding our concepts as the targets of philosophical theorising, and I just don't think that, in the vast majority of cases, the subject matter of philosophy has our concepts as its target.
The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premisses you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to beleive it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief.
In physics, opinions don't matter, only demonstrated experiments. The day the fellow succeeds, if ever, he won't need anybody else's opinion.
Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.
It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity.
The problem with the focus on speculators, as was demonstrated during the financial crisis, is that it tends to divert attention from the real villains. During the financial crisis, the villains were the actions of the banks, not the speculators betting on bank share prices.
All evangelists want to do is share a message about the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. But our world is confused by the confidence we have in the gospel, and is threatened by it. Satan, I am sure, causes those things to echo in the world to increase this sort of common confusion.
The less manifest the work, the stronger: as though a secret law demanded it always be hidden in what it shows, thus showing what must remain hidden, only showing it, in the end, by dissimulation.
It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity. That means that you look for something, you have a certain plan, and then you find something else, different, that may nevertheless be useful.
Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive -- to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling -- to be not being, not to be.
Common sense is not something rigid and stationary, but is in continuous transformation, becoming enriched with scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation. 'Common sense' is the folklore of philosophy and always stands midway between folklore proper (folklore as it is normally understood) and the philosophy, science, and economics of the scientists. Common sense creates the folklore of the future, a relatively rigidified phase of popular knowledge in a given time and place.
Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows tracings of her workings apart from the beaten paths; nor is there any better way to advance the proper practice of medicine than to give our minds to the discovery of the usual law of nature, by careful investigation of cases of rarer forms of disease.
Democrats had a secret meeting in Reid's office on Halloween night at 6:15 and they hatched this plot. They said the only way they could get this investigation going was to do it in secret. They say they've been frustrated for a year and a half in getting this investigation into whether the administration twisted the intelligence and they're making no apologies whatsoever for it.
Confusing common causes with special causes will only make things worse.
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