The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are always before us, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a way that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity. Our pleasure at finding that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound into melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result is handled with far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving contrivance.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
A philosophic conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving contrivance
William James in The Will to Believe and Other Essays, page 65.
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