When the mind is employed in finding facts, its sheer success inhibits it sooner or later from fact finding uninterruptedly ad infinitum. Sooner or later it finds itself so formidably beleaguered by the mass of facts which it has gathered round it that, until it has sorted them out and arranged them in some kind of order, it can no longer sally into the universe to gather more. Then the mind changes its activity perforce and employs itself for a season in making syntheses and interpretations. Yet now, once again, its sheer success inhibits it from working, uninterruptedly and ad infinitum, at bringing order out of chaos. Sooner or later, it finds that it has reduced to order all those materials which it had collected in its last fact-finding reconnoissance. Fresh facts now must be found before the process of synthesis and interpretation can be carried further. And so, in due course, the mind changes its activity once more and issues out, by the new paths which it has cleared for itself, into the Universe that ever awaits its coming in order to gather facts there again, as before, until the time approaches for the next attempt at synthesis and interpretation on a new plain and perhaps on a larger scale. No collection of facts is ever complete, because the Universe is without bounds. And no synthesis and interpretation is ever final, because there are always fresh facts to be found after the first collection has been provisionally arranged.
- Arnold Toynbee
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