“The question of common sense is always "What is it good for?"—a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.”

— James Russell Lowell

"Chaucer," http://books.google.com/books?id=LOdNAAAAcAAJ&q=%22The+question+of+common+sense+is+always+what+is+it+good+for+a+question+which+would+abolish+the+rose+and+be+answered+triumphantly+by+the+cabbage%22&pg=PA185#v=onepage North American Review (July 1870) http://books.google.com/books?id=sAVaov3zePMC&q=%22The+question+of+common+sense+is+always+what+is+it+good+for+a+question+which+would+abolish+the+rose+and+be+answered+triumphantly+by+the+cabbage%22&pg=PA173#v=onepage
My Study Windows (1871)

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James Russell Lowell 175

American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat 1819–1891

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“What is the question, to which this is the answer?”

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“Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.”

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“What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Letter to Markus Fierz (1948)
Context: What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations. It seems to me one has to postulate a cosmic order of nature — outside of our arbitrariness— to which the outer material objects are subjected as are the inner images... The organizing and regulating has to be posited beyond the differentiation of physical and psychical... I am all for it to call this "organizing and regulating" "archetypes." It would then be inadmissible to define these as psychic contents. Rather, the above-mentioned inner pictures (dominants of the collective unconscious, see Jung) are the psychic manifestations of the archetypes, but which would have to produce and condition all nature laws belonging to the world of matter. The nature laws of matter would then be the physical manifestation of the archetypes.