We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.

If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent in science until its proceedings become systematic, or the truths already reached give direction to further research.

The accidental causes of science are only accidents relatively to the intelligence of a man.

And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.

The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and she sometimes decrees, indeed, that her reasons shall not be ours.

The simplest principles become difficult of practice, when habits, formed in error, have been fixed by time, and the simplest truths hard to receive when prejudice has warped the mind.