Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle: Use

“The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the calculus can be treated as truths of experiment. The sciences must proceed to first causes, above all mathematics where one cannot assume, as in physics, principles that are unknown to us. For there is in mathematics, so to speak, only what we have placed there… If, however, mathematics always has some essential obscurity that one cannot dissipate, it will lie, uniquely, I think, in the direction of the infinite; it is in that direction that mathematics touches on physics, on the innermost nature of bodies about which we know little.”

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

Elements de la géométrie de l'infini (1727) as quoted by Amir R. Alexander, Geometrical Landscapes: The Voyages of Discovery and the Transformation of Mathematical Practice (2002) citing Michael S. Mahoney, "Infinitesimals and Transcendent Relations: The Mathematics of Motion in the Late Seventeenth Century" in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg, Robert S. Westman (1990)

Truth , Lie , Mathematics , Nature

“Now, the Priests who belonged to the Temples, scorn'd to use the same Customs in common with these Gypsies; for they thought themselves to be a nobler and graver sort of Fortune-tellers; which makes a mighty difference, I'll assure you, in this great affair.”

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

p, 125
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)

“Men are not willing to suffer the decision of things to be too easie, and therefore they mingle their own prejudices with truths, and so create greater perplexities than are Naturally found therein; and those scruples, which our selves frame, give us the most pain to untangle.”

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

p, 125
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)

Men , Pain , Truth , Nature