Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes.
A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth.
Science is the most complete presentment of facts with the least expenditure of thought
Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.
I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.
I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.
Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.
The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.
What Mach calls a thought experiment is of course not an experiment at all. At bottom it is a grammatical investigation.
Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.
Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.
Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.
Personally, people know themselves very poorly.
Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.
If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.
To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter.
The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example or the processes by which natural science generally is developed.
The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind.
The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.
The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.
My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.
Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the 'elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all 'bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes).
The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.
Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.
Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.
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