"Scientia", rivista di scienza: Rivista internazionale di sintesi scientifica, Volume 13

Front Cover
Zanichelli, 1913
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 253 - The Law of Causation, the recognition of which is the main pillar of inductive science, is but the familiar truth that invariability of succession is found by observation to obtain between every fact in nature and some other fact which has preceded It...
Page 176 - Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their...
Page 105 - Une religion est un système solidaire de croyances et de pratiques relatives à des choses sacrées, c'est-à-dire séparées, interdites, croyances et pratiques qui unissent en une même communauté morale, appelée Église, tous ceux qui y adhèrent.
Page 255 - same cause, same effect', which philosophers imagine to be vital to science, is therefore utterly otiose. As soon as the antecedents have been given sufficiently fully to enable the consequent to be calculated with some exactitude, the antecedents have become so complicated that it is very unlikely they will ever recur. Hence, if this were the principle involved, science would remain utterly sterile.
Page 260 - No doubt the reason why the old "law of causality" has so long continued to pervade the books of philosophers is simply that the idea of a function is unfamiliar to most of them, and therefore they seek an unduly simplified statement. There is no question of repetitions of the "same" cause producing the "same" effect; it is not in any sameness of causes and effects that the constancy of scientific law consists, but in sameness of relations. And even "sameness of relations" is too simple a phrase;...
Page 249 - All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms or postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word "cause
Page 174 - There can also be little doubt that the tendency to vary in the same manner has often been so strong that all the individuals of the same species have been similarly modified without the aid of any form of selection.
Page 174 - I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position — namely, at the close of the Introduction the following words : "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.
Page 252 - But then we are faced with a dilemma: if the cause is a process involving change within itself, we shall require (if causality is universal) causal relations between its earlier and later parts; moreover, it would seem that only the later parts can be relevant to the effect, since the earlier parts are not contiguous to the effect, and therefore, (by the definition) cannot influence the effect.
Page 261 - law of causality' is not assumed by science, something which we may call the 'uniformity of nature' is assumed, or rather is accepted on inductive grounds. The uniformity of nature does not assert the trivial principle 'same cause, same effect', but the principle of the permanence of laws. That is to say, when a law exhibiting, eg, an acceleration as a function of the configuration has been found to hold throughout the observable past, it is expected that it will continue to hold in the future, or...

Bibliographic information