James George Fraser. Golden Branch (№ 418544)

... The history of thought also provides us with the following lesson: from the fact that the scientific view is the best of the hitherto formulated ideas about the world, it is not necessary to conclude that it is final and comprehensive. It should not be overlooked that scientific generalizations are essentially nothing more than hypotheses invented to order the phantasmagoria of thought in the process of constant change, which we arrogantly call the world and the universe. In the final analysis, magic, religion, and science are merely modes of theoretical thinking, and just as science has supplanted its predecessors, in the future it may be replaced by another, more perfect hypothesis. Perhaps it will be a radically different view of things, or rather, on their shadows on the screen of the mind. a view that our generation cannot make the slightest idea of. The progress of knowledge is an endless advance towards an eternally elusive goal. And it is hardly necessary to grumble that this search has no end: