A quote for the introduction

From In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age
Peter Allan Dale
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

"Science....leads to the imaginary": Vaihinger's point (from The Philosophy of "As If," 1911) nicely summarizes some 75 years of intesne speculation on the method and meaning of science.  The point, as Vaihinger argues it, is safely epistemological.  Nineteenth-century scientific philosophers, although they might have begun by setting themselves the task of overthrowing the unreal, the imaginary constructions of metaphysics, repeatedly came back, in one way and another, to the realization that the initial move in the development of any scientific knowledge, whether of the natural or the human world, must be some sort of imaginary projection" (280).