organons

We are not a religious people, and shall not present any development of that sort until the intellectual reaction which has set in among us against the old modes and organons of belief has exhausted the tests of its crucibles, and reduced the dross to a residuum of gold which shall form the basis of a new and sacred currency, acceptable to all men for the highest interchanges.

The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864 Devoted To Literature And National Policy Various

I consider the failure of the alchemical theory of Nature to be due rather to the misapplication of these fundamental concepts, to the erroneous use of a priori methods of reasoning, to a lack of a sufficiently wide knowledge of natural phenomena to which to apply these con - cepts, to a lack of adequate apparatus with which to investigate such phenomena experimentally, and to a lack of mathematical organons of thought with which to interpret such experimental results had they been obtained.

Bygone Beliefs 1969