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21 " The first part, or the Æsthetics, which has nothing in common with art, disengages the a priori forms of sensible knowledge, namely, the forms of space and time, which furnish mathematics with their object. Æsthetics thus divorced mathematics from reality, for it makes the condition of mathematics not the real, but a mental form of space and time. "
― Fulton J. Sheen ,
22 " The question: 'is the Euclidean geometry true?' has no significance for Poincaré, for these is no such thing as one geometry being more true than another. "
23 " Physical experience is the translation of phenomena into symbolic language, and the law is the creation of the wind or a symbol. "
24 " Gaston Milhaud, like many of his contemporaries, sought to overthrow empirical positivism by insisting on the fundamental reality of the mind, but mind conceived in the Kantian sense. The knowledge of nature is symbolic, and there is no necessary connection between the phenomena and our fictions. "
25 " Even in the realm of pure mathematics, the mathematician may use any set of symbols he desires within any given region of space-time; he may even go so far as to maintain that any one set of symbols fits the scheme as well as any other, but to erect this method into a philosophy and confuse independence of any one special meaning with independence of all meaning is unjustified and unwarranted. "
26 " The mathematical method is disinterested in the efficient cause and the final cause or the goodness of a thing and it should not be so disinterested. "
27 " The familiar would of sense experience is not entirely objectively real, but is to some extent a product of the scientists' reasoning. "
28 " Hearing is the motion of molecules; sound is a wave in the atmosphere; solidity is the characteristic of spatial juxtaposition of atoms; smell is something given off by a body, rather than something belonging to a body. "
29 " Do mathematics have a relation to reality or are they only a mathematical symbol? "
30 " The Angelic Doctor himself is not certain that the astronomical theories of his own time explain the heavens and the movements of the sun and the stars "
31 " Any event or group of events may be viewed from different degrees of abstraction. A man jumps from a bridge. The psychologists make abstraction from everything except the mental state which prompted the suicide; the biologists abstract from everything except the dying organism; while the physicists are interested in the man, not as mind, or as organism, but as a falling body. "
32 " For the Angelic Doctor, the reason of conceptual knowledge is just the contrary! It is not his distance from the animal that renders abstraction necessary; it is his distance from God. Abstraction is not a condition of a push from below; it is a result of a fall from above. Abstraction is necessary because our intellect is imperfect. This is the fundamental reason. "
33 " The 'fullness of reality' in the second sense of the term is perceived by a combination of both intellect and sense, the senses knowing the particular characteristics, the intellect knowing the nature. "
34 " For if we understood or said that colour is not in a coloured body, or that it is separated from it, there would be error in this opinion or assertion. But if we consider colour and its properties, without reference to the apple which is coloured; or if we express in words what we thus understand, there is no error in such an opinion or assertion, because an apple is not essential to colour, and therefore, colour can be understood independently of the apple. "
35 " The physicist takes water, abstracts its quantitatively measurable aspects, reaches results about these aspects, and ignores the rest. "
36 " The mind has three operations: the formation of ideas, judgements and reasoning. "
37 " I study philosophy after my dinner, but the dinner is not the cause o my studying philosophy. "
38 " It is the forgetfulness of these principles which as made for the anarchy in thinking in so much of the anemic philosophy of our day. "
39 " The physical theory suffers from the same affect as humanism; it attempts to live on its own fat and breathe the very air which it has already exhaled from its scientific lungs. "
40 " When experimental psychology limits itself to rats and kittens, squabs and eyelids, philosophy of nature has little opportunity for formation. But when experimental psychology delivers over its findings concerning phenomenal manifestations of the mind, then the philosophy of nature may apply his philosophical principles. "