On Abstraction (1920-1929)

"It is not surprising that the greatest mathematicians have again and again appealed to the arts in order to find some analogy to their own work. They have indeed found it in the most varied arts, in poetry, in painting, and in sculpture, although it would certainly seem that it is in music, the most abstract of all the arts, the art of number and of time, that we find the closest analogy." (Havelock Ellis, "The Dance of Life", 1923)

"Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Science and the Modern World", 1925)

"Progress in truth - truth of science and truth of religion - is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Religion in the Making, Truth and Criticism", 1926)

"Often a liberal antidote of experience supplies a sovereign cure for a paralyzing abstraction built upon a theory." (Benjamin N Cardozo, "The Paradoxes of Legal Science", 1928)