Intuition Is More Important To Discovery Than

Mathematics Is The Art Of Giving The Same Name To Different Things. [as Opposed To The Quotation: Poetry Is The Art Of Giving Different Names To The Same Thing].

It Is Often Said That Experiments Should Be Made Without Preconceived Ideas. That Is Impossible. Not Only Would It Make Every Experiment Fruitless, But Even If We Wished To Do So, It Could Not Be Done. Every Man Has His Own Conception Of The World, And This He Cannot So Easily Lay Aside. We Must, Example, Use Language, And Our Language Is Necessarily Steeped In Preconceived Ideas. Only They Are Unconscious Preconceived Ideas, Which Are A Thousand Times The Most Dangerous Of All.

Thus, Be It Understood, To Demonstrate A Theorem, It Is Neither Necessary Nor Even Advantageous To Know What It Means. The Geometer Might Be Replaced By The "logic Piano" Imagined By Stanley Jevons; Or, If You Choose, A Machine Might Be Imagined Where The Assumptions Were Put In At One End, While The Theorems Came Out At The Other, Like The Legendary Chicago Machine Where The Pigs Go In Alive And Come Out Transformed Into Hams And Sausages. No More Than These Machines Need The Mathematician Know What He Does.

Mathematical Discoveries, Small Or Great Are Never Born Of Spontaneous Generation They Always Presuppose A Soil Seeded With Preliminary Knowledge And Well Prepared By Labour, Both Conscious And Subconscious.

Analyse Data Just So Far As To Obtain Simplicity And No Further.