We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of language and analytical methods in thinking and reasoning.
Lavoisier highlights the integral role that language plays in our ability to think critically and express our thoughts clearly. He suggests that both language and mathematical frameworks, like algebra, are essential tools for reasoning, enabling us to articulate complex ideas and engage in analysis effectively.
In practice
In a lecture about the importance of communication skills in STEM fields.
Imagination, on the contrary, which is ever wandering beyond the bounds of truth, joined to self-love and that self-confidence we are so apt to indulge, prompt us to draw conclusions which are not immediately derived from facts.
We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
Perhaps... some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.
If everything in chemistry is explained in a satisfactory manner without the help of phlogiston, it is by that reason alone infinitely probable that the principle does not exist; that it is a hypothetical body, a gratuitous supposition; indeed, it is in the principles of good logic, not to multiply bodies without necessity.
It took them only an instant to cut of that head, but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a singular one.
While I thought myself employed only in forming a nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.
I have a responsibility to pass on to the next generation what I learned from my teachers, ... It keeps me young and reminds me where I came from. Teaching young artists is like giving water to a flower.
When I was a boy I was called a nerd all the time — because I didn’t like sports, I loved to read, I liked math and science, I thought school was really cool — and it hurt a lot. Because it’s never ok when a person makes fun of you for something you didn’t choose. You know, we don’t choose to be nerds. We can’t help it that we like these things — and we shouldn’t apologize for liking these things.
To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.
I do feel, in my dreamings and yearnings, so undiscovered by those who are able to help me.
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
We have an education and business culture that tends to reward quick factual answers over imaginative inquiry. Questioning isn’t encouraged - it is barely tolerated.
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