Compiled by Subhanjan Sengupta | Posted on 8th May 2019

“Have we any reason, assuming that they have always held in the past, to suppose that they will hold in the future?”

“When two things are found to be often associated, and no instance is known of one occurring without the other, does the occurrence of one of the two, in a fresh instance, give any good ground for expecting the other?”

“The inductions that scientists are inclined to accept are such as commend themselves to what may be called scientific common sense. If common sense is ignored, induction is much more likely to lead to false conclusions than to true ones.”

“There are two sorts of knowledge: knowledge of things, and knowledge of truths.”

“We shall say we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference. [...] All our knowledge, both knowledge of things and knowledge of truths, rests upon acquaintance as its foundation.”

“We also have acquaintance of what we shall call universals, that is to say, general ideas, such as whiteness, diversity, brotherhood, and so on. [...] Awareness of universals is called conceiving and a universal of which we are aware of is called concept.”

“In any empirical subject-matter I expect, though without complete confidence, that a thorough understanding will reduce the more important causal laws to those of physics, but where the matter is very complex, I doubt the practical feasibility of the reduction.”

“Analysis gives new knowledge without destroying any of the previously existing knowledge. [...] It seems to me that philosophical investigation, as far as I have experience of it, starts from that curious and unsatisfactory state of mind in which one feels complete certainty without being able to say what one is certain of.”