Observations placeholder
Babbage, Charles - The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
Identifier
004028
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Once Babbage had conceived of the universe as a vast spiritual system of interrelated functions, he began to see that our knowledge of the systems of the universe was indeed pretty meagre.
In the section on learnt function I have added a bit about heuristical models and how much we still - even today - rely on them. In Babbage's day heuristcal models were very much in evidence, the difference being that Babbage and many like him had come to recognise just how very crude they were as a means of understanding the world.
A description of the experience
....therefore the probability of any law with which we have become acquainted by observation being part of a much more extensive law and of its having, to use mathematical language, singular points or discontinous functions contained within it, is very large