"If we seek a cause wherever we perceive symmetry, it is not that we regard a symmetrical event as less possible than the others, but, since this event ought to be the effect of a regular cause or that of chance, the first of these suppositions is more probable than the second.” (Pierre-Simon de Laplace, "Philosophical Essay on Probabilities”, 1812)
"The difficulty of bringing idea and experience into relation with one another makes itself very painfully felt in all investigation of nature. The idea is independent of space and time. Research is limited in space and time. Hence in the idea simultaneous and successive features are most intimately linked, whereas these are always separated in experience; and to think of a process of nature as simultaneous and successive at once, in accordance with the idea, makes our heads spin. The understanding is unable to conceive of those sense data as jointly present which experience transmitted to it one at a time. Thus, the contradiction between ideation and perception remains forever unresolved. " (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Doubt and Resignation", 1820)
"Truth travels down from the heights of philosophy to the humblest walks of life, and up from the simplest perceptions of an awakened intellect to the discoveries which almost change the face of the world. At every stage of its progress it is genial, luminous, creative." (Edward Everett, [address] 1835)
"A line, as defined by geometers, is wholly unconceivable. We can reason about a line as if it had no breadth; because we have a power, which is the foundation of all the control we can exercise over the operations of our minds; the power, when a perception is present to our senses, or a conception to our intellects, of attending to a part only of that perception or conception, instead of the whole. But we cannot conceive a line without breadth: we can form no mental picture of such a line: all the lines which we have in our minds are lines possessing breadth." (John S Mill, "System of Logic ratiocinative and inductive, being a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of scientific investigation", 1843)
"All existing things upon this earth, which have knowledge of their own existence, possess, some in one degree and some in another, the power of thought, accompanied by perception, which is the awakening of thought by the effects of external objects upon the senses." (Augustus De Morgan, "Formal Logic: Or, The Calculus of Inference, Necessary and Probable", 1847)
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