If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent in science until its proceedings become systematic, or the truths already reached give direction to further research.

A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is directand simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.

Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control.

Let one persuade many, and he becomes confirmed and convinced, and cares for no better evidence.

We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.

The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why and she sometimes decrees, indeed, that her reasons shall not be ours.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

The accidental causes of science are only accidents relatively to the intelligence of a man.

And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.