Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No… — Henri Poincaré
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.
Cette harmonie que l’intelligence humaine croit découvrir dans la nature, existe-t-elle en dehors de cette intelligence ? Non, sans doute, une réalité complètement indépendante de l’esprit qui la conçoit, la voit ou la sent, c’est une impossibilité. Un monde si extérieur que cela, si même il existait, nous serait à jamais inaccessible. Un monde si extérieur que cela, si même il existait, nous serait à jamais inaccessible.
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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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.
If all the parts of the universe are interchained in a certain measure, any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause, but the resultant of causes infinitely numerous; it is, one often says, the consequence of the state of the universe the moment before.
