
“The knowledge of all things is possible”
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy
Variant: Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.
“The knowledge of all things is possible”
Coding theorems for a discrete source with a fidelity criterion. IRE International Convention Records, volume 7, pp. 142--163, 1959.
Context: This duality can be pursued further and is related to a duality between past and future and the notions of control and knowledge. Thus we may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.
Commentary (p.92): Nichomacus is an idealist. He states his position in a way that recalls Plato's distinction between "that which ever exists, having no becoming" and "that which is ever becoming, never existent,"... On the one hand there are "the real things... which exist forever changeless and in the same way in the cosmos, never departing from their existence even for a brief moment," and on the other "the original eternal matter and substance" which was entirely "subject to deviation and change."
Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic (1926)
Context: The ancients, who under the leadership of Pythagoras first made science systematic, defined philosophy as the love of wisdom... [Οἱ παλαιοὶ καὶ πρώτοι μεθοδεύσαντες ἐπιστήμην κατάρξαντος Πυθαγόρου ὡρίζοντο φιλοσοφίαν εἶναι φιλίαν σοφίας... ] This 'wisdom' he defined as the knowledge, or science, of the truth in real things, conceiving 'science' to be a steadfast and firm apprehension of the underlying substance. and 'real things' to be those which continue uniformly and the same in the universe and never depart even briefly from their existence; these real things would be things immaterial...<!--p.181
“So far as it goes, a small thing may give an analogy of great things, and show the tracks of knowledge.”
Dum taxat, rerum magnarum parva potest res
exemplare dare et vestigia notitiai.
Dum taxat, rerum magnarum parva potest res
exemplare dare et vestigia notitiae.
Book II, lines 123–124 (tr. Rouse)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from "Tales of Power" (Chapter 10)
Theonas: Conversations of a Sage (1921). Sheed & Ward, 1933, p. 77.
Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros (c. 1217-1220)
“Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”
1940s, A History of Western Philosophy (1945)