Many ancient authors extolled the virtues of experiment and observation.9 But the Alexandrians, for all their research grants, found it a good deal harder to learn from experience than to praise doing so. The fields in which the careful recording of observational data perhaps went furthest in antiquity were divination and astrology. Cicero reports the Stoic arguments for divination and their replies to the Skeptics. It is an important passage both for its suggestion that in sciences without certainty a reasonable level of mistakes can be tolerated without that making the science worthless, and
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