All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoverie… - Karl Pearson

[T]his work... is... intended to arouse and stimulate the reader's own thought, rather than to inculcate doctrine: this result is often best achieved by the assertion and contradiction which excite the reader to independent inquiry.

[M]y axiom runs as follows: "The whole is not identical with a part." This axiom leads us at once to a problem. What relation has the part to the whole?

Standing in 1875 on the well known wooden bridge at Luzern, with its pictures of the Dance of Death, it struck me that something might be done to resuscitate the mediaeval conception of the relation between Death and Chance and to express it in a more modern scientific form. ...[M]y aim in this essay is to place before the reader a modern conception of the Dance of Death.