Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, Kepler to Einstein

ion of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence, and carefully estimating the probabitity thereof by a vulgar fraction, by the size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is ideally as inept as it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philos ophers should pretend that any philosophy can be, or ever has been, con structed without the help of personal preference, belief, or divination. How have they succeeded in so stultifying their sense for the living facts of human nature as not to perceive that every philospher, or man of science either, whose initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has taken his stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one direction rather than another, and a sort of preliminary assurance that his notion can be made to work; and has borne his best fruit in trying to make it work?'