Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard
Claude Bernardwas a French physiologist. Historian Ierome Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science". Among many other accomplishments, he was one of the first to suggest the use of blind experiments to ensure the objectivity of scientific observations. He originated the term milieu intérieur, and the associated concept of homeostasis...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth12 July 1813
CityRhone, France
CountryFrance
Man does not limit himself to seeing; he thinks and insists on learning the meaning of phenomena whose existence has been revealed to him by observation. So he reasons, compares facts, puts questions to them, and by the answers which he extracts, tests one by another. This sort of control, by means of reasoning and facts, is what constitutes experiment, properly speaking; and it is the only process that we have for teaching ourselves about the nature of things outside us.
We achieve more than we know. We know more than we understand. We understand more than we can explain.
First causes are outside the realm of science.
The eloquence of a scientist is clarity; scientific truth is always more luminous when its beauty is unadorned than when it is tricked out in the embellishments with which our imagination would seek to clothe it.
Priestley [said] that each discovery we make shows us many others that should be made.
The better educated we are and the more acquired information we have, the better prepared shall we find our minds for making great and fruitful discoveries.
Science rejects the indeterminate.
In science, the best precept is to alter and exchange our ideas as fast as science moves ahead.
Proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be established that when this condition is removed, the phenomen will no longer appear.
But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.
A great discovery is a fact whose appearance in science gives rise to shining ideas, whose light dispels many obscurities and shows us new paths.
All the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment.
When entering on new ground we must not be afraid to express even risky ideas so as to stimulate research in all directions. As Priestley put it, we must not remain inactive through false modesty based on fear of being mistaken.
In every enterprise ... the mind is always reasoning, and, even when we seem to act without a motive, an instinctive logic still directs the mind. Only we are not aware of it, because we begin by reasoning before we know or say that we are reasoning, just as we begin by speaking before we observe that we are speaking, and just as we begin by seeing and hearing before we know what we see or what we hear.