“The obscurity which envelops the principia of science is not only due to an historical evolution influenced by the authority which attaches even to the phraseology used by great discoverers, but to the fact that science, as long as it had to carry on a difficult warfare with metaphysics and dogma, like a skilful general conceived it best to hide its own deficient organisation.”

— Karl Pearson , book The Grammar of Science

Preface to the First Edition
The Grammar of Science (1900)

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Karl Pearson 65

English mathematician and biometrician 1857–1936

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“One of the first and most difficult steps in a science is to conceive clearly the nature of the magnitudes about which we are arguing.”

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James Whitbread Lee Glaisher (1848–1928) English mathematician and astronomer

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Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 10, p. 253

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