The bad man is the man who no matter how good he has been is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who no matter how morally unworthy he has been is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.
Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.
Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done.
Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.
The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind.
Man’s home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.
Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.
To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.
The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.
An idea is a method of evading, circumventing or surmounting through reflection, obstacles that otherwise would have to be attacked by brute force.
Thought is impossible without words.
Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.
The moment philosophy supposes it can find a final and comprehensive solution, it ceases to be inquiry and becomes either apologetics or propaganda.
Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.
Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations.
But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.
Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life.
Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them.
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.