Sublime

One need never worry that the last piece of the puzzle will be found, instilling the sadness of completion, the permanent loss of future puzzling.

so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again.

depend on an accurate apprehension of the context

To the degree that my quest had an object, that object turned out to be learning to live with uncertainty and incapacity.

To appreciate this point, let us go back to Glanvill circa 1661. He had just published The Vanity of Dogmatizing, which pleaded for religious tolerance over persecution and freedom of thought over scholasticism. In the treatise, he questions how we can be dogmatic about religion (and the immaterial world) when we have such deep uncertainty about sc

I were to treat a question as a proper question, rather than a problem in disguise—which is to say, to ask that question purely for the sake of answering it—could I tell when I had in fact arrived at the answer? This is called “Meno’s paradox,”

We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities; in history, as in science and politics, relativity rules, and all formulas should be suspect.