Behold... the only... [rule] we can follow: when a phenomenon appears... as the cause of another, we regard… — Henri Poincaré
Behold... the only... [rule] we can follow: when a phenomenon appears... as the cause of another, we regard it as anterior. ...[T]herefore by cause... we define time; but...how do we recognize which is the cause and which the effect? We assume... the anterior fact, the antecedent, is the cause of the... consequent. It is then by time that we define cause. ...[S]hall we escape from this vicious circle?
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exterior as that, even if it existed, would for us be forever inaccessible.
Time and Space … It is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient.
The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. One must not think then that the old-fashioned theories have been sterile or vain.
