The 'law of wills and causes,' formulated by Comte, . . . is that when men do not know the natural causes of things, they simply attribute them to wills like their own thus they obtain a theory which provisionally takes the place of science, and this theory forms a basis for theology.

He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour.

I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.

The establishment of Christianity . . . arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years.

In an address before the Academia, which had been organized to combat science falsely so called, Cardinal Manning declared his abhorrence of the new view of Nature, and described it as a brutal philosophy to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam. ...These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical fashion for several ye

The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.

Even before Melanchthon sank into his grave, he was dismayed at seeing Lutheranism stiffen into dogmas and formulas, and heartbroken by a persecution from his fellow-Protestants more bitter than anything he had ever experienced from Catholics.

For similar folly, our own country, in the transition from the colonial period, also paid a fearful price and from a like catastrophe the United States has been twice saved in our time by the arguments formulated by Turgot.

My early years abroad were spent mainly upon the European Continent, and public duties since have led me to make prolonged stays in various Continental states France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia where the study of Continental statesmen has been almost forced upon me.

Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it.

The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently the worst.

The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts.