Science... may be viewed as man's supreme effort to find himself in that perplexing pattern which he calls Nature. ...Has he succeeded in achieving s… - Tobias Dantzig

Poincaré's mind was not subject to hysteresis or hibernation. He had the unique faculty of dismissing an idea from his mind, the instant the stimulus was gone, and to supplant it immediately with another creative idea.

The Industrial Revolution, too, failed to introduce a reign of freedom and happiness: it converted the medieval serf into an industrial slave; replaced the feudal baron by the industrial mogul, created in its wake an ever-growing, ever-shifting class of declassés, who had neither pride of ancestry nor love of tradition... The age of machine and competition, of capital, class-struggle, and demagogy was upon man.

To describe means to classify, and the man Poincaré defies classification, as does indeed his philosophy.