It Is Not Order Only, But Unexpected

If Nature Were Not Beautiful, It Would Not Be Worth Knowing, And If Nature Were Not Worth Knowing, Life Would Not Be Worth Living

Consider Now The Milky Way. Here Also We See An Innumerable Dust, Only The Grains Of This Dust Are No Longer Atoms But Stars; These Grains Also Move With Great Velocities, They Act At A Distance One Upon Another, But This Action Is So Slight At Great Distances That Their Trajectories Are Rectilineal; Nevertheless, From Time To Time, Two Of Them May Come Near Enough Together To Be Deviated From Their Course, Like A Comet That Passed Too Close To Jupiter. In A Word, In The Eyes Of A Giant, To Whom Our Suns Were What Our Atoms Are To Us, The Milky Way Would Only Look Like A Bubble Of Gas.

Absolute Space, That Is To Say, The Mark To Which It Would Be Necessary To Refer The Earth To Know Whether It Really Moves, Has No Objective Existence.... The Two Propositions: "the Earth Turns Round" And "it Is More Convenient To Suppose The Earth Turns Round" Have The Same Meaning; There Is Nothing More In The One Than In The Other.

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.

A Reality Completely Independent Of The Spirit That Conceives It, Sees It, Or Feels It, Is An Impossibility. A World So External As That, Even If It Existed, Would Be Forever Inaccessible To Us.