The Essence Of Belief Is The Establishment

Kepler's Discovery Would Not Have Been Possible Without The Doctrine Of Conics. Now Contemporaries Of Kepler-such Penetrating Minds As Descartes And Pascal-were Abandoning The Study Of Geometry ... Because They Said It Was So Utterly Useless. There Was The Future Of The Human Race Almost Trembling In The Balance; For Had Not The Geometry Of Conic Sections Already Been Worked Out In Large Measure, And Had Their Opinion That Only Sciences Apparently Useful Ought To Be Pursued, The Nineteenth Century Would Have Had None Of Those Characters Which Distinguish It From The Ancien Régime.

No General Description Of The Mode Of Advance Of Human Knowledge Can Be Just Which Leaves Out Of Account The Social Aspect Of Knowledge. That Is Of Its Very Essence. What A Thing Society Is! The Workingman, With His Trade Union, Knows That. Men And Women Moving In Polite Society Understand It, Still Better. But Bohemians, Like Me, Whose Work Is Done In Solitude, Are Apt To Forget That Not Only Is A Man As A Whole Little Better Than A Brute In Solitude, But Also That Everything That Bears Any Important Meaning To Him Must Receive Its Interpretation From Social Considerations.

And What, Then, Is Belief? It Is The Demi-cadence Which Closes A Musical Phrase In The Symphony Of Our Intellectual Life.

Every New Concept First Comes To The Mind In A Judgment.

The Third Class Consists Of Men To Whom Nothing Seems Great But Reason. If Force Interests Them, It Is Not In Its Exertion, But In That It Has A Reason And A Law. For Men Of The First Class, Nature Is A Picture; For Men Of The Second Class, It Is An Opportunity; For Men Of The Third Class, It Is A Cosmos, So Admirable, That To Penetrate To Its Ways Seems To Them The Only Thing That Makes Life Worth Living. These Are The Men Whom We See Possessed By A Passion To Learn.