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Carl L. Becker
(7 Sep 1873 - 10 Apr 1945)
American historian and author best known for his book The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers.(1932)
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Science Quotes by Carl L. Becker (6 quotes)
All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.
— Carl L. Becker
In Everyman His Own Historian (1935), 136. The book is expanded from his presidential address (1931) to the American Historical Association.
Professor Whitehead has recently restored a seventeenth century phrase—"climate of opinion." The phrase is much needed. Whether arguments command assent or not depends less upon the logic that conveys them than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained.
— Carl L. Becker
In The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932, 2003), 5
The questions we ask are "What?" and "How?" What are the facts and how are they related? If sometimes, in a moment of absent-mindedness or idle diversion, we ask the question "Why?" the answer escapes us.
— Carl L. Becker
In The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932, 2003), 16
The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.
— Carl L. Becker
In Progress and Power: Three Lectures, April 1935 (1936), 101.
The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves—a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future.
— Carl L. Becker
In 'A New Philosophy of History', The Dial (2 Sep 1915), 148. This is Becker’s concluding remark in his review of a book by L. Cecil Jane, The Interpretation of History. Becker refutes Jane’s idea that the value of history lies in whether it consists in furnishing “some clue as to what the future will bring.”
Why, it is asked, since the scientist, by means of classification and experiment, can predict the “action of the physical world, shall not the historian do as much for the moral world”! The analogy is false at many points; but the confusion arises chiefly from the assumption that the scientist can predict the action of the physical world. Certain conditions precisely given, the scientist can predict the result; he cannot say when or where in the future those conditions will obtain.
— Carl L. Becker
In 'A New Philosophy of History', The Dial (2 Sep 1915), 148. This is Becker’s review of a book by L. Cecil Jane, The Interpretation of History. Becker refutes Jane’s idea that the value of history lies in whether it consists in furnishing “some clue as to what the future will bring.”
See also:
- The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers, by Carl L. Becker. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for Carl L. Becker.
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) -- 
