Lawrence Joseph Henderson quotes
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“A … difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare.”
-- Lawrence Joseph Henderson -
“I have always had the feeling that organic chemistry is a very peculiar science, that organic chemists are unlike other men, and there are few occupations that give more satisfactions [sic] than masterly experimentation along the old lines of this highly specialised science.”
-- Lawrence Joseph Henderson -
“But weightier still are the contentment which comes from work well done, the sense of the value of science for its own sake, insatiable curiosity, and, above all, the pleasure of masterly performance and of the chase. These are the effective forces which move the scientist. The first condition for the progress of science is to bring them into play.”
-- Lawrence Joseph Henderson -
“Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.”
-- Lawrence Joseph Henderson -
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“Historically the most striking result of Kant's labors was the rapid separation of the thinkers of his own nation and, though less completely, of the world, into two parties;-the philosophers and the scientists.”
-- Lawrence Joseph Henderson -
“The concept of an independent system is a pure creation of the imagination. For no material system is or can ever be perfectly isolated from the rest of the world. Nevertheless it completes the mathematician's "blank form of a universe" without which his investigations are impossible. It enables him to introduce into his geometrical space, not only masses and configurations, but also physical structure and chemical composition. Just as Newton first conclusively showed that this is a world of masses, so Willard Gibbs first revealed it as a world of systems.”
-- Lawrence Joseph Henderson -
“It is a strange irony that the principles of science should seem to deny the necessary conviction of common sense.”
-- Lawrence Joseph HendersonSource : "The order of Nature". Book by awrence Joseph Henderson, Ch. 5, 1917.
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“A … difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare.”
-- Lawrence Joseph Henderson -
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“Even more exasperating than the guy who thinks he knows it all is the one who really does.”
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“If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.”
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Source : Abraham Hayward (1858). “Biographical and Critical Essays: Reprinted from Reviews, with Additions and Corrections”, p.391
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