Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Physiology, both of plants and animals, psycho-physiology, and the psychological faculties of man and animals are so many branches of knowledge requiring more data of the simplest description.

History remains a fable convenue chiefly because it wants fresh ideas, but also because it wants scientifically thinking workers to reconstitute the life of past centuries in the same way as Thorold Rogers or Augustin Thierry have done it…

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

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 theory of electricity which gave us the telegraph.

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…

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.

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 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.

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…

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…

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…

How much more medicine would trust to hygiene, and how much less to prescriptions, if the young doctors were the nurses of the sick and the nurses received the education of the doctors of our time!

Free pursuit in new branches of art and knowledge, free creation, and free development thus might be fully guaranteed.

And such a community would not know misery amidst wealth.

It would freely take its flight towards the highest regions of progress compatible with human nature.

Readers who have had the patience to follow the facts accumulated in this book, especially those who have given them a thoughtful attention, will probably feel convinced of the immense powers over the productive forces of Nature that man…

Besides, I reasoned, there is in Siberia an immense field for the application of the great reforms which have been made or are coming: the workers must be few there, and I shall find a field of action to my tastes.

This great conflagration became a turning-point not only in the policy of Alexander II., but also in the history of Russia in that part of the century.

In such conditions, judging from the ordinary narrow military standpoint, to destroy the Bank of Russia and several Ministries, and to spread a panic in the capital might have been considered a good plan of warfare; but there never was the…