"The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined in intellectual combinations."

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In geology we cannot dispense with conjectures: [but] because we are condemned to dream let us ensure that our dreams are like those of sane men-e.g. that they have their foundations in truth-and are not like the dreams of the sick, formed by strange combinations of phantasms, contrary to nature and therefore incredible.

— Scipione Breislak