That all science is description and not explanation, that the mystery of change in the inorganic world is just as great and just as omnipresent as in… - Karl Pearson

This idea of Death as the lawless one... who strikes at random, arose early in mediaeval tradition, and is represented in the well known Dances of Death... Parallel with this notion... has run in the mind of the folk a vague idea of Chance as that which obeys no rule and defies all measure and prediction. The two conceptions cross one another in the medieval representation of Death seizing the gambler's dice-box and casting the dice with him for his life.

[M]ediaeval ...alchemy, astrology, witchcraft. ...Do we now know how the stars influence human lives or how witches turn milk blue? Not in the least. We have learnt to look upon the facts themselves as unreal, as vain imaginings of the untrained human mind; we have learnt that they could not be described scientifically because they involved notions which were in themselves contradictory and absurd. ...So soon as science entered the field of alchemy with a true classification and a true method, alchemy was converted into chemistry and became an important branch of human knowledge.

[W]hen the law is reached... it must be tested and criticised by its discoverer in every conceivable way, till he is certain that the imagination has not played him false, and that his law is in real agreement with the whole group of phenomena...