Hermann von Helmholtz > Quotes

“I have been able to solve a few problems of mathematical physics on which the greatest mathematicians since Euler have struggled in vain ... But the pride I might have held in my conclusions was perceptibly lessened by the fact that I knew that the solution of these problems had almost always come to me as the gradual generalization of favorable examples, by a series of fortunate conjectures, after many errors. I am fain to compare myself with a wanderer on the mountains who, not knowing the path, climbs slowly and painfully upwards and often has to retrace his steps because he can go no further—then, whether by taking thought or from luck, discovers a new track that leads him on a little till at length when he reaches the summit he finds to his shame that there is a royal road by which he might have ascended, had he only the wits to find the right approach to it. In my works, I naturally said nothing about my mistake to the reader, but only described the made track by which he may now reach the same heights without difficulty.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz

“During the first half of the present century we had an Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to scan the scientific knowledge of his time in its details, and to bring it within one vast generalization. At the present juncture, it is obviously very doubtful whether this task could be accomplished in a similar way, even by a mind with gifts so peculiarly suited for the purpose as Humboldt's was, and if all his time and work were devoted to the purpose.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz

“What the recent physiology of the senses has shown by the way of experience is what Kant had tried to show for the representations of the human mind in general when he laid out the participation of the particular, built-in rules of the mind, the organization of the mind as it were, in our representations.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Goethe's Vorahnungen Kommender Naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen

“Our sensations are effects brought forth in our organs by means of exterior causes, and how such an effect manifests itself depends of course quite essentially on the nature of the apparatus on which the cause operates. Insofar as the quality of our sensations gives us information about the peculiarities of the exterior process that excites it, it can count as a sign of that process, but not as a picture. For one expects of a picture some sort of similarity with the pictured object . . . But a sign need have no similarity of any sort whatever with that of which it is the sign. The relation between them is only that the same object, working its effects in the same way, produces the same sign, and that unequal signs always correspond to unequal causes.
To the popular view, which naively and complacently assumes the full truth of the pictures that our senses give us of things, this remainder of similarity that we recognise may seem rather paltry. In truth it is not; with its aid something of the greatest significance can be achieved: the representation of the regularities in the processes of the real world . . . So even if our sense impressions in their qualities are only signs, whose special nature depends wholly on our internal organisation, they are nonetheless not to be dismissed as empty appearance, but are in fact a sign of something, whether this is something existing or something occurring; and what is most important, they can picture the law of this occurring.”
― Hermann Helmholtz

“I am fain to compare myself with a wanderer on the mountains who, not knowing the path, climbs slowly and painfully upwards and often has to retrace his steps because he can go no further—then, whether by taking thought or from luck, discovers a new track that leads him on a little till at length when he reaches the summit he finds to his shame that there is a royal road by which he might have ascended, had he only the wits to find the right approach to it. In my works, I naturally said nothing about my mistake to the reader, but only described the made track by which he may now reach the same heights without difficulty.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz

“Goethe, though he exercised his powers in many spheres, is nevertheless, par excellence, a poet. Now in poetry, as in every other art, the essential thing is to make the material of the art, be it words, or music, or colour, the direct vehicle of an idea. In the perfect work of art, the idea must be present and dominate the whole, almost unknown to the poet himself, not as the result of a long intellectual process, but as inspired by a direct intuition of the inner eye, or by an outburst of excited feeling.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays

“In his [Goethe's] studies on morphology, he reminds one of a spectator at a play, with strong artistic sympathies. His delicate instinct makes him feel how all the details fall into their places, and work harmoniously together, and how some common purpose governs the whole; and yet, while this exquisite order and symmetry gives him intense pleasure, he cannot formulate the dominant idea. That is reserved for the scientific critic of the drama, while the artistic spectator feels perhaps, as Goethe did in the presence of natural phenomena, an antipathy to such dissection, fearing... that his pleasure may be spoilt by it.
[On Goethe's Scientific Researches (1853)]”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays

“Every great deed of which history tells us, every mighty passion which art can represent, every picture of manners, of civic arrangements, of the culture of peoples of distant lands, or of remote times, seizes and interests us, even if there is no exact scientific connection among them. We continually find points of contact and comparison in our own conceptions and feelings; we get to know the hidden capacities and desires of the mind.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays

“I would compare myself to a mountain climber who, not knowing the way, ascends slowly and toilsomely and is often compelled to retrace his steps because his progress is blocked; who, sometimes by reasoning and sometimes by accident, hits upon signs of a fresh path, which leads him a little farther; and who finally, when he has reached his goal, discovers to his annoyance a royal road on which he might have ridden up if he had been clever enough to find the right starting point at the beginning. In my papers and memoirs I have not, of course, given the reader an account of my wanderings, but have only described the beaten path along which one may reach the summit without trouble.”
― Hermann Helmholtz

“For most foreigners the uncontrolled freedom of German students is a subject of astonishment; the more so as it is usually some obvious excrescences of this freedom which first meet their eyes; they are unable to understand how young men can be left to themselves without the greatest detriment. The German looks back to his student life as to his golden age; our literature and our poetry are full of expressions of this feeling. Nothing of this kind is but even faintly suggested in the literature of other European peoples. The German student alone has this perfect joy in the time, in which, in the first delight in youthful responsibility, and freed more immediately from having to work for extraneous interests, he can devote himself to the task of striving after the best and noblest which the human race has hitherto been able to attain in knowledge and in speculation”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays

“Every adherent of any given cosmological system, in which, for well or ill, facts must be made to correspond with reality, felt himself [in the 'former time'] to be a philosopher. The philosophers of that time knew little more of the laws of nature than the unlearned layman; but the stress of their endeavours was laid upon thinking, upon the logical consequences and completeness of the system. It is not difficult to understand how in periods of youthful development, such a one-sided over-estimate of thought could be arrived at.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays

“All that we apprehend of the external world is brought to our consciousness by means of certain changes which are produced in our organs of sense by external impressions, and transmitted to the brain by the nerves. It is in the brain that these impressions first become conscious sensations, and are combined so as to produce our conceptions of surrounding objects. If the nerves which convey these impressions to the brain are cut through, the sensation, and the perception of the impression, immediately cease.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision; A Course of Lectures Delivered in Frankfort and Heidelberg, and Republished in the Preussische Jahrbücher, 1868