Karl Pearson Quotes

[T]his deficient organisation will not only in time be perceived by the enemy, but... has already had a very discouraging influence both on scientific recruits and on intelligent laymen.

[S]mall as our increase in knowledge may be, concrete systems of religion have not kept pace with it. They persist in explaining by myth, portions of the relation of... which we have true knowledge. Hence we see the danger, if not the absolute evil of any myth at all.

Who can give us the assurance that the fields already occupied by science are alone those in which knowledge is possible? Who, in the words of Galilei, is willing to set limits to the human intellect?

The scientific conception of chance is that of a measure based on experience; a knowledge of the average results of many events is used to replace ignorance of the result of any individual event. ...The judgment which Science gives in this case is decisive; judged by the so called "permanences," or runs of colour, Monte Carlo roulette is no true worship of the goddess at all.

It is not theory, but actual statistical experience, which forces us to the conclusion that, however little we know of what will happen in the individual instance, yet the frequency of a large number of instances is distributed round the mode in a manner more and more smooth and uniform the greater the number of individual instances. When this distribution round the mode does not take place... then we assert that some cause other than chance is at work.

Science can only answer to the great majority of "metaphysical" problems "I am ignorant." Meanwhile, it is idle to be impatient or to indulge in system-making.

[I]t was soon clear to me that I was collecting as much information bearing on the family history of Charles Darwin as on that of Francis Galton. It seemed desirable to place the two men to some extent in contrast in my volume, showing in ancestry, in methods of work and in outlook on life what they had in common and how they differed.

[P]rogress... enables me to define several... conceptions much more accurately than was possible in 1892, and to indicate, if only in vague outline, what a fascinating field is being here transferred from the synoptic to the precise division of science.

[R]andom spinning being assumed, the distribution of chance in the game depends upon the mechanical perfection of the teetotum; it must be equally likely to fall on all its thirty-seven sides, i.e. the frequency of all the numbers must in the long run be very nearly the same.

[W]hen the law is reached... it must be tested and criticised by its discoverer in every conceivable way, till he is certain that the imagination has not played him false, and that his law is in real agreement with the whole group of phenomena...

That all science is description and not explanation, that the mystery of change in the inorganic world is just as great and just as omnipresent as in the organic world, are statements which will appear platitudes to the next generation.

[I]n the seventeenth century... the system-mongers were the theologians who declared that cosmical problems were not the legitimate problems of science. It was vain for Galilei to assert that the theologians' classification of facts was hopelessly inadequate. ...[T]hey settled that:—
"The doctrine that the earth is neither the centre of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith."
It took nearly two hundred years to convince the whole theological world that cosmical problems were the legitimate problems of science and science alone, for in 1819 the books of Galilei, Copernicus, and Keppler were still upon the index of forbidden books, and not till 1822 was a decree issued allowing books teaching the motion of the earth about the sun to be printed and published in Rome!

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.

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).

The field of science is unlimited; its material is endless, every group of natural phenomena, every phase of social life, every stage of past or present development is material for science. The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material.