Nature Is Our Kindest Friend And

The source is letter 2411 in The Correspondence of Michael Faraday, Vol. 4 (1999), edited by Frank A. J. L. James — a letter to physicist John Tyndall dated 19 April 1851. The fuller passage reads: "I have far more confidence in the one man who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely talk about it... Nothing is so good as an experiment which, whilst it sets an error right, gives us (as a reward for our humility in being reproved) an absolute advancement in knowledge." Tyndall later wrote Faraday as a Discoverer (1868), one of the first major assessments of his mentor's scientific legacy.