Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury.
Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.
The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.
Both ways set out from the senses and particulars, and rest in the highest generalities; but the difference between them is infinite. For the one just glances at experiment and particulars in passing, the other dwells duly and orderly among them. The one, again, begins at once by establishing certain abstract and useless generalities, the other rises by gradual steps to that which is prior and better known in the order of nature.
There is a great difference between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine. That is to say, between certain empty dogmas, and the true signatures and marks set upon the works of creation as they are found in nature.
[W]e offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy. For all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this, from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of Nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena.
A judgment of observation can never rank as experience, without the law, that "whenever an event is observed, it is always referred to some antecedent, which it follows according to a universal rule." ...We cannot therefore study the nature of things a priori otherwise than by investigating the conditions and the universal (thought subjective) laws, under which alone such a cognition as experience (as to mere form) is possible...
The first process... in the effectual study of science must be one of simplification and reduction of previous investigation to a form in which the mind can grasp them. The results of this simplification may take the form of a purely mathematical formula or of a physical hypothesis.
[T]he only thing that I believe that I am really fit for is the investigation of abstract truth, and the more abstract the better. If there is any science that I am capable of promoting, I think it is the science of science itself, the science of investigation, of method.
It is my task to inquire how it has come about that a generation so amazingly proficient in the practice of science can be so amazingly impotent in the understanding of it... the state of unconscious automatism in which science finds itself today is due to the lack throughout history of a critical school working within the scientific movement itself and performing... at least one of the functions, which criticism has performed for literature from the earliest times.
I fully agree with you about the about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. ...A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is... the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.
Very frequently science has served by means of its metaphysical interpretations as a direct guide to human conduct. ...by its metaphysical interpretations it has served what has been called, occasionally, "human engineering." ..."philosophy of science" leads eventually to a research in the "pragmatics of science," which envisages a coherent system containing the physical and biological as well as the sciences of human behavior.
In an ideal university the student would not proceed from the most recent observations back to the first principles, but from the first principles to whatever recent observations we claim significant in understanding them. ...The natural sciences derive their principles from the philosophy of nature which, in turn, depends on metaphysics. ...Metaphysics, the study of the first principles, pervades the whole. Dependent on it and subordinate to it are the social and natural sciences.