No sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal … - Michael Polanyi

A declaratory sentence can be asserted, because it is an incomplete symbol, of indeterminate modality; while a question, a command, an invective, or any other sentence of fixed intention can no more be asserted than could my act of hewing wood or of drinking tea.

Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge. Personal knowledge is an intellectual commitment, and as such inherently hazardous. Only affirmations that could be false can be said to convey objective knowledge of this kind.

While the articulate contents of science are successfully taught all over the world in hundreds of universities, the unspecifiable art of scientific research has not yet penetrated to many of these.