Whirlpool Quotes (2 quotes)
Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
Address at The Physical Society, Berlin (1918) for Max Planck’s 60th birthday, 'Principles of Research', collected in Essays in Science (1934, 2004) 3.
The question, What is cholera? is left unsolved. Concerning this, the fundamental point, all is darkness and confusion, vague theory, and a vain speculation. Is it a fungus, an insect, a miasm,
an electrical disturbance, a deficiency of ozone, a morbid offscouring from the intestinal canal? We know nothing; we are at sea, in a whirlpool of conjecture.
Editorial in Lancet 1 (1853), 393. As quoted in Peter Vinten-Johansen, et al., Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (2003), 116.