Influencing Future Science
The most important influence, however, was the first precept, which states, in Descartes words," never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such".
This method of pro-foundational skepticism is considered by some to be the start of modern philosophy.
Read more about this topic: Discourse On The Method
Famous quotes containing the words influencing, future and/or science:
“Do you believe that the dead can influence the living?... Could you conceive of a superhuman mentality influencing someone from the other side of death?... There is such a one.... Someone, something that reaches out from beyond the grave and fills me with horrible impulses.”
—Garrett Fort (19001945)
“Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.”
—Samuel Johnson (17091784)
“Already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)