"Kant...accepted the notion of things-in-themselves existing independently of any knowledge....  As his starting point [he took it] that any specific knowledge we claim to have of such and such an external object is obtained through our senses, [and] hence is at best only indirect and questionable....  What we know directly and with certainty is therefore only the set of our ideas.  [For example,] the very notion of causality [is] an a priori mode of human understanding," in other words, an idea (d'Espagnat 1995:5-7).

           "The wave function of quantum mechanics just describes our knowledge about the system and not the state of the system, in the same way as the Boltzmann equation tells us nothing about the actual state of the system, but just something about the probable outcomes of a measurement" (Cercignani 1998:119).

           "By dissolving Newton's absolute space and time into a network of relationships, general relativity takes a first step away from the notion that the coherence of the world lies outside of it" (Smolin 1997:240). In fact, Einstein said, "Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live" (quoted in Forsee 1963:81).

           "A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth" (Bohr, quoted in Rees et al. 1974:297).  For example, "viewing a thing from outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter.  Viewing it from inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness" (Peirce 1892:353). And, "although all inertial systems are equivalent, according to the mechanics of Galileo and Newton as well as to that of Einstein's special relativity, one can always find a privileged system defined by the fact that from within it the observer sees an isotropic expansion of the universe about him" (Cercignani 1998:111).

           "Advances in cosmology and black holes physics lend new emphasis to some of the most remarkable consequences of Einstein's standard theory:...nature conserves nothing; there is no constant of physics that is not transcended; or, in a word, mutability is a law of nature" (Wheeler 1979:).

           "The reality of things consists in their persistent forcing themselves upon our recognition.  If a thing has no such persistence, it is a mere dream.  Reality, then, is persistence, is regularity" (Peirce c.1897:358).

            "An evolution is a series of events that in itself is purely physical,--a set of necessary occurrences in the world of space and time.  An egg develops into a chick; a poet grows up from infancy; a nation emerges from barbarism; a planet condenses from a fluid state, and develops the life that for millions of years makes it so wonderous a place.  Look upon all these things descriptively, and you shall see nothing but matter moving instant after instant, each containing in its full description the necessity of passing over into the next.  Nowhere will there be, for descriptive science, any genuine novelty or any discontinuity admissible.  But look at the whole appreciatively, historically, synthetically, as a musician listens to a symphony, as a spectator watches a drama.  Now you shall have seen, in phenomenal form, a story" (Royce 1892:425).