TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it... That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That�s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index B > Brand Blanshard Quotes

Brand Blanshard
(27 Aug 1892 - 19 Nov 1987)

American philosopher , following somewhat the tradition of British idealist philosophers such as Bernard Bosanquet and Francis Bradley.

Science Quotes by Brand Blanshard (5 quotes)

…reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge … as an attempt by our mind to return to union with things as they are in their ordered wholeness…. and if we take this view, our notion of truth is marked out for us. Truth is the approximation of thought to reality … Its measure is the distance thought has travelled … toward that intelligible system … The degree of truth of a particular proposition is to be judged in the first instance by its coherence with experience as a whole, ultimately by its coherence with that further whole, all comprehensive and fully articulated, in which thought can come to rest.
— Brand Blanshard
In The Nature of Thought (1921), Vol II, 264.
Science quotes on:  |  Advance (298)  |  Approximation (32)  |  Attempt (266)  |  Coherence (13)  |  Completely (137)  |  Comprehensive (29)  |  Degree (277)  |  Distance (171)  |  Experience (494)  |  First (1302)  |  Growth (200)  |  Intelligible (35)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Law (913)  |  Look (584)  |  Marked (55)  |  Measure (241)  |  Mind (1377)  |  More (2558)  |  Notion (120)  |  Order (638)  |  Proposition (126)  |  Reality (274)  |  Rest (287)  |  Return (133)  |  Scientific Method (200)  |  System (545)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Thought (995)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Ultimately (56)  |  Union (52)  |  View (496)  |  Whole (756)  |  Wholeness (9)

As the race has advanced from the animal mind to savagery and then to science, the character it has ascribed to the stars, let us say, has undergone the most radical change, but hardly the character of the stars themselves.
— Brand Blanshard
In The Nature Of Thought Vol. 1 (1921), 425.
Science quotes on:  |  Advance (298)  |  Animal (651)  |  Ascribe (18)  |  Change (639)  |  Character (259)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Race (278)  |  Radical (28)  |  Savagery (2)  |  Star (460)

I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it wholly nonsense for Kepler to exult that he was thinking God's thoughts after him. The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.
— Brand Blanshard
'Reply to Lewis Edwin Hahn', The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (1980), 901.
Science quotes on:  |  Degree (277)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Do (1905)  |  Eternal (113)  |  Follow (389)  |  God (776)  |  G. H. Hardy (71)  |  Johannes Kepler (95)  |  Mathematician (407)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Nonsense (48)  |  Sense (785)  |  Surrender (21)  |  System (545)  |  Talking (76)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thinker (41)  |  Thinking (425)  |  Thought (995)  |  Timeless (8)  |  Wholly (88)  |  World (1850)

If science could get rid of consciousness, it would have disposed of the only stumbling block to its universal application.
— Brand Blanshard
'Reply to Francis V. Raab', The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (1980) 807.
Science quotes on:  |  Application (257)  |  Consciousness (132)  |  Dispose (10)  |  Stumbling Block (6)  |  Universal (198)

Thought, looked at from the inside, is not a mechanical succession of ideas, but a cry for ‘more light’.
— Brand Blanshard
In The Nature Of Thought Vol. 1 (1921), 459.
Science quotes on:  |  Cry (30)  |  Idea (881)  |  Inside (30)  |  Light (635)  |  Mechanical (145)  |  Succession (80)  |  Thought (995)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.