Synthesis In Science

“The purpose of science, and all rational thought, is to make a more ample and more coherent picture of the world, in which each experience holds together better and is more of a piece. This is the task of synthesis, not analysis. The analysis, then, is not an end in itself; it is not an end at all. It has to be made in order to extract the common features in what seem to be different experiences; what science is trying to do is to make a unity of these. …

The mind, then, analyzes when it reasons or when it experiments only to get the raw materials for a new synthesis. The common content that the mind finds, the synthesis that it makes, is always a concept. …

The facts are endless chaos; science is the activity of finding in them some order. And this order is not merely a shorthand for the facts; it is what gives them meaning. Science is the human activity of finding order in nature by organizing the scattered meaningless facts under universal concepts.”

Jacob Bronowski, A Sense Of The Future, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1977.

“And I cherish more than anything else the analogies, my most trustworthy masters. They know all the secrets of Nature, and they ought least to be neglected in Geometry.”

Johannes Kepler