Karl Pearson Quotes

The old Dances of Death supplied what fails so much in our modern life—an artistic representation appealing to all classes of at least one experience common to the whole of humanity.

[M]y axiom runs as follows: "The whole is not identical with a part." This axiom leads us at once to a problem. What relation has the part to the whole?

The holding of a myth explanation of any problem whereon mankind has attained true knowledge is what I term enslaved thought or dogmatism.

There is an old German proverb: "Death has no calendar," which taken in conjunction with our... "Death is no respecter of persons," strongly marks the folk conception... as of one who obeys no rule of time, or of place, or of age, or of sex, or of household...

Heredity. Given any organ in a parent and the same or any other organ in its offspring, the mathematical measure of heredity is the correlation of these organs for pairs of parent and offspring... The word organ here must be taken to include any characteristic which can be quantitatively measured.

Does not the beauty of the artist's work lie for us in the accuracy with which his symbols resume innumerable facts of our past emotional experience? ... [A]esthetic judgment... how exactly parallel it is to the scientific judgment.

If the reader questions whether there is still war between science and dogma, I must reply that there always will be as long as knowledge is opposed to ignorance. To know requires exertion, and it is intellectually easiest to shirk effort altogether by accepting phrases which cloak the unknown in the undefinable.

Preface, pp. xii-xiii. Here Pearson refers to Clausius' Ueber die Verdäderungen welche in den bisher gebräuchlichen Formeln für das Gleichgewicht und die Bewegung elastischer fester Körper durch neuere Beobachtungen nothwendig geworden sind, in Poggendorf's Annalen (1849) Vol. 76, pp. 46-67; and to Weber's Königliche Gesellschafl der Wissenschaflen (1835).

[M]ediaeval ...alchemy, astrology, witchcraft. ...Do we now know how the stars influence human lives or how witches turn milk blue? Not in the least. We have learnt to look upon the facts themselves as unreal, as vain imaginings of the untrained human mind; we have learnt that they could not be described scientifically because they involved notions which were in themselves contradictory and absurd. ...So soon as science entered the field of alchemy with a true classification and a true method, alchemy was converted into chemistry and became an important branch of human knowledge.

[T]he value of science for practical life turns upon the efficient training it provides in method. ...to marshal facts... examine their complex mutual relations and predict... their inevitable sequences... which we term natural laws...[such a man ...will scarcely be content with merely superficial statement, with vague appeal to the imagination, to the emotions, to individual prejudices. He will demand a high standard of reasoning, a clear insight into facts and their results ...beneficial to the community at large.

Now it will, I think, be found that the fields of inquiry where science has not yet penetrated and where the scientist still confesses ignorance, are very like... alchemy astrology and witchcraft... Either they involve facts which are in themselves unreal—conceptions which are self-contradictory and absurd, and therefore incapable of analysis by the scientific or any other method,—or, on the other hand, our ignorance arises from an inadequate classification and a neglect of scientific method.

[B]ear these points in mind, the association of Death and Chance, the notion of both as chaotic in their action, and their embodiment in a great artistic ideal—the Dance of Death—which gave so much colouring to mediaeval thought and life. We find this sombre notion everywhere—on the church walls, on the bridges, in the engravings and s, but as well in the sermons, the poetry, and the very turn of folk-sentiment.

The original work as planned by Clifford was to have been entitled The First Principles of the Mathematical Sciences Explained to the Non-Mathematical and to have contained six chapters on Number, Space, Quantity, Position, Motion, and Mass respectively. ...Shortly before his death he expressed a wish that the book should only be published after very careful revision and that its title should be changed to [our title]. Upon Clifford's death the labour of revision and completion was entrusted to Mr. R. C. Rowe... On the sad death of Professor Rowe... I was requested... to take up the... editing thus left incomplete. ...For the latter half of Chapter III and for the whole of Chapter IV... I am alone responsible. Yet whatever there is in them of value I owe to Clifford; whatever is feeble or obscure is my own. ...With Chapter V. my task has been by no means light. ... I felt it impossible to rewrite the whole without depriving the work of its right to be called Clifford's, and yet at the same time it was absolutely necessary to make considerable changes. ...Without any notice of mass or force it seemed impossible to close a discussion on motion; something I felt must be added. I have accordingly introduced a few pages on the laws of motion [and] since found that Clifford intended to write a concluding chapter on mass. How to express the laws of motion in a form of which Clifford would have approved was indeed an insoluble riddle... because I was unaware of his having written on the subject. I have accordingly expressed... my own views on the subject [i.e.,] a strong desire to see the terms matter and force, together with the ideas associated with them, entirely removed from scientific terminology—to reduce, in fact, all dynamic to kinematic. I should hardly have ventured to put forward these views had I not recently discovered that they have... the weighty authority of Professor Mach... But since writing these pages I have also been referred to a discourse delivered by Clifford at the Royal Institution in 1873, some... of which appeared in Nature June 10, 1880 [pp. 122-123.<nowiki>]</nowiki> Therein it is stated that 'no mathematician can give any meaning to the language about matter, force, inertia used in current text-books of mechanics.' This fragmentary account of the discourse undoubtedly proves that Clifford held on the categories of matter and force as clear and original ideas as on all subjects of which he has treated; only, alas! they have not been preserved.
<small>Footnote: Mr. R. Tucker who... searched Clifford's note books... sends me... the following... in Clifford's handwriting: 'Force is not a fact at all, but an idea embodying what is approximately the fact.'</small>

Minds trained to scientific methods are less likely to be led by mere appeal to the passions or by blind emotional excitement to sanction acts which in the end may lead to social disaster. ...therefore, I lay stress upon the educational side of modern science and state my position..: Modern Science, as training the mind to an exact and impartial analysis of facts, is an education specially fitted to promote sound citizenship.

Our conception of chance is one of law and order in large numbers; it is not that idea of chaotic incidence which vexed the mediaeval mind.