"All knowledge, it may be safely said, must be ultimately founded upon experience, which is but a general name for the various feelings impressed upon the mind at any period of its existence. The mind never creates entirely new knowledge independent of experience, and all that the reasoning powers can do is to arrive at the full meaning of the facts which are in our possession... Anything that we can clearly conceive must be conformable to the laws of thought, and its existence is then not impossible, so far as our intellect is concerned; but the forms and sizes and manners in which it has pleased the Creator to make things in this or any other part of the universe, cannot possibly be anticipated by the exceedingly limited wisdom of the human lnind, and can only be learnt by actual examination of existing things."
William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882)
Note:
Quoted from Lesson XXVII - Observation and Experiment of his 1870 book Elementary Lessons in Logic Deductive and Inductive.
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