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In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.

Alfred North Whitehead

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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Truth
Ultimate
Mechanics
Ideas
Becomes
Mechanic
Things
Modern
Explanation
Grows
Mathematical
Belief
Math
Times
Mathematics
Science
Towards
Found
Perfection
Newtonian

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The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
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The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.
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It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
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In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.
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The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it.
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The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.
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A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.
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The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .
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Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
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Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.
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Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
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The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
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War can protect it cannot create.
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There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.
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Error is the price we pay for progress.
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A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.
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Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
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Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
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