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Investigator and Attempter.—There is no exclusive method of knowing in science. We must deal with things tentatively, treating them by turns harshly or justly, passionately or coldly. One investigator deals with things like a policeman, another like a confessor, and yet a third like an inquisitive traveller. We force something from them now by sympathy and now by violence: the one is urged onward and led to see clearly by the veneration which the secrets of the things inspire in him, and the other again by the indiscretion and malice met with in the explanation of these secrets. We investigators, like all conquerors, explorers, navigators, and adventurers, are men of a daring morality, and we must put up with our liability to be in the main looked upon as evil.
Investigator and Attempter.—There is no exclusive method of knowing in science. We must deal with things tentatively, treating them by turns harshly or justly, passionately or coldly. One investigator deals with things like a policeman, another like a confessor, and yet a third like an inquisitive traveller. We force something from them now by sympathy and now by violence: the one is urged onward and led to see clearly by the veneration which the secrets of the things inspire in him, and the other again by the indiscretion and malice met with in the explanation of these secrets. We investigators, like all conquerors, explorers, navigators, and adventurers, are men of a daring morality, and we must put up with our liability to be in the main looked upon as evil.
Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
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- Author or tradition
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1844–1900); not quotation composition date
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- The Dawn of Day (1911 English edition) (1911 AD)
The Dawn of Day, complete printed unit 432; John McFarland Kennedy translation; New York: The MacMillan Company,1911
A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.
The voice behind the words.
Author of Human, All-Too-Human, here represented by complete numbered passages in Helen Zimmern’s 1909 and Paul V. Cohn’s 1913 English editions. Catalogue lifetime 1844–1900; historical philosophical arguments and dated viewpoints require context, rather than treating every sentence as general advice.
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