In the words of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Hippolyte Taine, we can say that “external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling ‘hallucination’ a false perception, we must call external perception ‘a confirmed hallucination.’”134 Science, we may say, is only an extension of the way in which we see: we seek out discrepancies between what we expect and what we gather from the world. We have visions of the world, and if they don’t work, we change them. The whole of human knowledge is constructed in this way.
