And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of t… - Jacob Bronowski

To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.

There has never been another moment in English history to equal the promise of that moment in the 1660’s when the Royal Society was formally founded. And though it was less dramatic elsewhere, it was a high moment throughout Europe.

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.

Yet, the principle of uncertainty is a bad name. In science or outside of it, we are not uncertain. Our knowledge is merely confined within a certain tolerance. We should call it the principle of tolerance. First in the engineering sense. Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge, all information, between human beings, can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance, and that's whether it's in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of though that aspires to dogma.