“A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.”

with Jean Medawar) Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology (1985
1980s

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Peter Medawar40

scientist 1915–1987

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

“There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

"Hypothesis and Imagination" (Times Literary Supplement, 25 Oct 1963)
1960s

“All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“The notion of style has long been the art historian's principal mode of classifying works of art. By style he selects and shapes the history of art.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

George Kubler summarizing the view of Meyer Schapiro (with whom he disagrees), quoted by Alpers in Lang, Berel (ed.), The Concept of Style, 1987, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801494397

“To describe means to classify, and the man Poincaré defies classification, as does indeed his philosophy.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 1. The Iconoclast