When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.
Jacob BronowskiThe central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
Jacob BronowskiWhen Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton ... are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.
Jacob BronowskiBeyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?
Jacob Bronowski