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"In the effort we make to understand the world, we are a little like a man who tries to comprehend the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the dial and the hands in movement, he hears the tick-tock, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he will be able to form a certain image of the mechanism, which will serve to answer for everything that he can observe, but he can never be sure that his image is the only one capable of explaining his observations. He will never be in a position to compare his image with the real mechanism, and he will not even be able to represent the possibility or the signification of such a comparison. But he believes most certainly that in the measure that his knowledge increases, his image of the reality will become more and more simple and will increasingly explain the domain understood by the sensible impressions. (pt) |
