Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

How much better the historian and the sociologist would understand humanity if they knew it, not in books only, not in a few of its representatives, but as a whole, in its daily life, daily work, and daily affairs!

But, whatever the occupations preferred by everyone, everyone will be the more useful in his own branch if he is in possession of a serious scientific knowledge.

Our teachers in art--Ruskin and his school--have repeatedly told us of late that we must not expect a revival of art as long as handicraft remains what it is; they have shown how Greek and mediæval art were daughters of handicraft, how one…

The flight of genius which has characterised the workers at the outset of modern industry has been missing in our professional men of science.

So that we can affirm that what we presently know is already sufficient for resolving any of the great problems which stand in the order of the day--prime-motors without the use of steam, the storage of energy, the transmission of force…

The scientific facts taken into account for inventing the steam-engine, or the telegraph, or the phonograph were strikingly elementary.

In most cases, the inventor, however inspired by the general state of science at a given moment, starts with a very few settled facts at his disposal.

This character of invention, which is to make a start in advance of former knowledge, instead of merely applying a law, makes it identical, as to the processes of mind, with discovery; and, therefore, people who are slow in invention are…

It is obvious that each invention avails itself of the previously accumulated knowledge and modes of thought; but in most cases it makes a start in advance upon what is known; it makes a leap in the unknown, and thus opens a quite new…

It belongs much more to the domain of art--art taking the precedence over science, as Helmholtz has so well shown in one of his popular lectures--and only after the invention has been made, science comes to interpret it.

Of course, we have a number of cases in which the discovery, or the invention, was a mere application of a scientific law (cases like the discovery of the planet Neptune), but in the immense majority of cases the discovery, or the…

It was not the theory of the explosives which led to the discovery of gunpowder; gunpowder was in use for centuries before the action of the gases in a gun was submitted to scientific analysis.

The American bridges were no application of the theory of elasticity; they came before the theory, and all we can say in favour of science is, that in this special branch, theory and practice developed in a parallel way, helping one…

The name of “applied science” is quite misleading, because, in the great majority of cases, invention, far from being an application of science, on the contrary creates a new branch of science.

Even the empirical knowledge of the laws of electrical currents was in its infancy when a few bold men laid a cable at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, despite the warnings of the authorised men of science.

It was not the theory of electricity which gave us the telegraph.

When all over the world industry already was transforming motion into heat, sound, light, and electricity, and each one into each other, then only came Grove’s theory of the “correlation of physical forces”; and Grove’s work had the same…

When thousands of engines had been illustrating for some time the impossibility of utilising all the heat disengaged by a given amount of burnt fuel, then came the second law of Clausius.

It was not the dynamical theory of heat which came before the steam-engine--it followed it.

The march of progress is quite the reverse, because in a hundred cases against one the mechanical invention comes before the discovery of the scientific law.

They will say: “We discover the laws of nature, let others apply them; it is a simple division of labour.” But such a rejoinder would be utterly untrue.

While industry, especially by the end of the last century and during the first part of the present, has been inventing on such a scale as to revolutionise the very face of the earth, science has been losing its inventive powers.

The rate of scientific progress would have been tenfold; and if the individual would not have the same claims on posterity’s gratitude as he has now, the unknown mass would have done the work with more speed and with more prospect for…

Scores of societies would have come to life to debate and to solve each of the partial problems involved in the theory, and in ten years the theory would have been verified; all those factors of evolution which only now begin to receive…

Had he lived in such a society as we suppose, he simply would have made an appeal to volunteers for facts and partial exploration, and thousands of explorers would have answered his appeal.