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Alexander Herzen
(6 Apr 1812 - 21 Jan 1870)
Russian social philosopher.
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Science Quotes by Alexander Herzen (4 quotes)
It seems to me that you are solving a problem which goes beyond the limits of physiology in too simple a way. Physiology has realized its problem with fortitude, breaking man down into endless actions and counteractions and reducing him to a crossing, a vortex of reflex acts. Let it now permit sociology to restore him as a whole. Sociology will wrest man from the anatomical theatre and return him to history.
— Alexander Herzen
Letter to his son, Alexander, July-Aug 1868. Trans. Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992), 223.
Man and science are two concave mirrors continually reflecting each other.
— Alexander Herzen
In Science and Humanity (1968).
Science even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, never lies for the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing out of coquetry. She stops before the facts as an investigator, sometimes as a physician, never as an executioner, and still less with hostility and irony.
— Alexander Herzen
My Past and Thoughts: the Memoirs of Alexander Herzen (revised translation 1968, 1982), 639.
Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.
— Alexander Herzen
My Past and Thoughts: the Memoirs of Alexander Herzen (revised translation 1968, 1982), 594.
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) -- 
