"Now it will, I think, be found that the fields of inquiry where science has not yet penetrated and where the scientist still confesses ignorance, are very like... alchemy astrology and witchcraft... Either they involve facts which are in themselves unreal—conceptions which are self-contradictory and absurd, and therefore incapable of analysis by the scientific or any other method,—or, on the other hand, our ignorance arises from an inadequate classification and a neglect of scientific method."

“Our conception of chance is one of law and order in large numbers; it is not that idea of chaotic incidence which vexed the mediaeval mind.”

“his work... is... intended to arouse and stimulate the reader's own thought, rather than to inculcate doctrine: this result is often best achieved by the assertion and contradiction which excite the reader to independent inquiry.”

“For the present the Grammar may yet be of service. After an eight years' life and... 4000 copies, it reappears in a revised and enlarged form.”

“Heredity. Given any organ in a parent and the same or any other organ in its offspring, the mathematical measure of heredity is the correlation of these organs for pairs of parent and offspring... The word organ here must be taken to include any characteristic which can be quantitatively measured.”

“Who can give us the assurance that the fields already occupied by science are alone those in which knowledge is possible? Who, in the words of Galilei, is willing to set limits to the human intellect?”

“I simply assert that the universe alters, is "becoming;" what it is becoming I will not venture to say. ...the individual too is altering, is not only a "being" but also a "becoming." These alterations... I shall—merely for convenience—term life.”