A Quote by William James

The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.

William James

Quote Topics

Among Greatest Infallible Instincts Left Like Only Reflection Us

Quote Author

William James
American - Philosopher
January 11, 1842 - August 26, 1910

That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.

Bill Watterson

To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.

Richard M. Weaver

More than half of all great remedies known to medical history have come from empiricists...'irregulars'...of no or little scientific training. There is no reason to believe that conditions have essentially changed.

Alexis Carrel

Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking as well as experience is necessary to know anything or get anything right.

Allen W. Wood

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

Will Self

Akri infallible. Well, except for a couple of things, and we don’t talk about those ‘cause it makes akri cranky. I like that word ‘infallible.’ It just like me. Infallible. (Simi)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.

Wendell Berry

Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.

George Bernard Shaw

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.

Thomas Sowell

From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.

Albert Camus

Among the great things which are found among us the existence of Nothing is the greatest.

Leonardo da Vinci

There is a number among us, young and old, of all sorts almost among us, that swarm up and down towns, and woods, and fields, whose care and work hitherto hath been like bees, only to get honey to their own hive.

Thomas Shepard

I read in the newspaper that the Catholic Church finally decided that it had been theologically improper to try to convert the Jews. Whoops! Sorry for all those inquisitions, crusades, and autos-da-fe. Previous popes were wrong - infallible, perhaps, but wrong.

Alan Dershowitz

Science is only ‘one’ of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible and it has become too powerful, too pushy and too dangerous to be left on its own.

Paul Feyerabend

Buddhist epistemologists do argue that rational analysis leads to the conclusion that rational analysis cannot give us infallible access to truth, including that one. That's not self-defeating, though; it only induces an important kind of epistemic humility and a clearer view of what we do when we reason. We engage in one more fallible human activity among many.