“I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. …It is… an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into… relevant and… irrelevant. We make a cut. We put the experiment… into a box. …the moment we do that, we do violence to the connections …I get a set of answers which I try to decode in this context. …I am certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that I have made about the world is a lie. …it is bound to give me only an approximation to what goes inside the fence. Therefore, when we practice science (and this is true of all our experience) we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.”
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)
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Jacob Bronowski 79
Polish-born British mathematician 1908–1974Related quotes

Source: Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), p. 5
Context: We Shall Naturally look round in vain the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist... The so-called "scientific view of the world" based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.

An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
1920s
Source: Beyond Apollo (1972), Chapter 60

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Limits Of Inference
Source: The Veneration of Life: Through the Disease to the Soul (1999), p. 54

Changing Consciousness (1991)
Context: If I am right in saying that thought is the ultimate origin or source, it follows that if we don't do anything about thought, we won't get anywhere. We may momentarily relieve the population problem, the ecological problem, and so on, but they will come back in another way.<!-- p. 25

22 August 1875.
The Walk With God (1919)