The Essence Of Belief Is The Establishment

A Hypothesis Is Something Which Looks As If It Might Be True And Were True, And Which Is Capable Of Verification Or Refutation By Comparison With Facts.

If Man Were Immortal He Could Be Perfectly Sure Of Seeing The Day When Everything In Which He Had Trusted Should Betray His Trust, And, In Short, Of Coming Eventually To Hopeless Misery. He Would Break Down, At Last, As Every Good Fortune, As Every Dynasty, As Every Civilization Does. In Place Of This We Have Death.

The Woof And Warp Of All Thought And All Research Is Symbols, And The Life Of Thought And Science Is The Life Inherent In Symbols; So That It Is Wrong To Say That A Good Language Is Important To Good Thought, Merely; For It Is The Essence Of It.

Fate Then Is That Necessity By Which A Certain Result Will Surely Be Brought To Pass According To The Natural Course Of Events However We May Vary The Particular Circumstances Which Precede The Event.

For Example, There Are Numbers Of Chemists Who Occupy Themselves Exclusively With The Study Of Dyestuffs. They Discover Facts That Are Useful To Scientific Chemistry; But They Do Not Rank As Genuine Scientific Men. The Genuine Scientific Chemist Cares Just As Much To Learn About Erbium-the Extreme Rarity Of Which Renders It Commercially Unimportant-as He Does About Iron. He Is More Eager To Learn About Erbium If The Knowledge Of It Would Do More To Complete His Conception Of The Periodic Law, Which Expresses The Mutual Relations Of The Elements.