anything but what reaches us in the receiver at the end of the wire?

The mind itself is a projecting lantern playing a shaft of light on nature;
how should it do otherwise than tint nature its own colour?

But these difficulties all arise out of the spatial metaphors employed; and
these metaphors in their turn do little but illustrate and translate the
common method of analysis by concepts: and this method is essentially
regulated by the practical needs of action and language.

The philosopher must adopt an attitude entirely inverse; not keep at a
distance from things, but listen in a manner to their inward breathing,
and, above all, supply the effort of sympathy by which he establishes
himself in the object, becomes on intimate terms with it, tunes himself to
its rhythm, and, in a word, lives it. There is really nothing mysterious
or strange in this.

Consider your daily judgments in matters of art, profession, or sport.

Between knowledge by theory and knowledge by experience, between
understanding by external analogy and perception by profound intuition,
what difference and divergence there is!

Who has absolute knowledge of a machine, the student who analyses it in
mechanical theorems, or the engineer who has lived in comradeship with it,
even to sharing the physical sensation of its laboured or easy working, who
feels the play of its inner muscles, its likes and dislikes, who notes its
movements and the task before it, as the machine itself would do were it
conscious, for whom it has become an extension of his own body, a new
sensori-motor organ, a group of prearranged gestures and automatic habits?