Empirical knowledge gives rise to abstractions (Berry)
April 11th, 2007 | Published in Nature, Science, Quotes
It is a curious paradox of science that its empirical knowledge of the material world gives rise to abstractions such as statistical averages which have no materiality and exist only as ideas. There is, empirically speaking, no average and no type. Between the species and the specimen the creature itself, the individual creature, is lost. Having been classified, dissected, and explained, the creature has disappeared into its class, anatomy, and explanation.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 39