The Experimentalist and the rational philosopher
(I am not persuaded that these two are, in the end, different)
Diderot—— spoke on behalf of the collecting experimentalist. Unlike the proud architects of luminous systems, the patient gatherer groped in the dark. Conscious of yawning gaps, he seized everything coming his way and only met with meaning, if at all, at the end of his journey. The rational philosopher and metaphysician began, instead, with “great abstractions” that shed only a dim light. For “the act of generalization tends to strip concepts of everything sensuous. As this process advances, corporeal phantoms recede; notions gradually pull away form the imagination toward the understanding & ideas become purely intellectual.”
taken somewhat out of context
B. Stafford, Body Criticism
