One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men… — Henri Poincaré
One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice.
As Mach says, these devotees have spared their successors the trouble of thinking.
p. 4Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
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.
For an aggregate of sensations to have become a remembrance capable of classification in time, it must have ceased to be actual, we must have lost the sense of its infinite complexity, otherwise it would have remained present. It must, so to speak, have crystallized around a center of associations of ideas which will be a sort of label. It is only when they have lost all life that we can classify our memories in time as a botanist arranges dried flowers in his herbarium.
