Friday, July 24, 2015

It is not the globe trotter who knows mankind, but the thinker...

From The Canon of Reason and Virtue (which I came across via the quote below in Mark Spitznagel's The Dao of Capital):
It is not the globe trotter who knows mankind, but the thinker. In order to know the sun's chemical composition we need not go to the sun; we can analyze the sun's light by spectrum analysis. We need not stretch a tape line to the moon to measure its distance from the earth, we can calculate it by the methods of an a priori science (trigonometry).