We become more and more aware that what we think about the world is not what the world is but what the human animal sees of the world. - Jacob Bronowski

Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We do not call their achievements creations because they are not personal enough. The West Indies were there all the time; and as for the telephone, we feel that Bell's ingenious thought was somehow not fundamental. The groundwork was there, and if not Bell then someone else would have stumbled on the telephone almost as accidently as on the West Indies.

The whole structure of thought in the Middle Ages is one which we find hard to grasp today. It was an orderly structure, but the principles by which it was ordered seem to us now outlandish and meaningless.

The purpose of science is to describe the world in an orderly scheme or language which will help us to look ahead. We want to forecast what we can of the future behaviour of the world; particularly we want to forecast how it would behave under several alternative actions of our own between which we are usually trying to choose.