Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:
Somehow I keep coming back to Nicholas of Cusa, that late medieval Renaissance man (1401-1464), a devout church leader and mathematical mystic who was at the same time one of the founders of modern experimental science—propagator, for example, of some of the first formal experiments in biology (proving that trees somehow absorb nourishment from the air, and that air, for that matter, has weight) and advocate, among other things, of the notion that the earth, far from being the center of the universe, might itself be in motion around the sun (this a good two generations before Copernicus), and yet, for all that, a cautionary skeptic as to the limits of that kind of quantifiable knowledge and thus, likewise, a critic of the then-reigning Aristotelian/Thomistic worldview. No, he would regularly insist, one could never achieve knowledge of God, or, for that matter, of the wholeness of existence, through the systematic accretion of more and more factual knowledge. Picture, he would suggest, an n-sided equilateral polygon nested inside a circle, and now keep adding to the number of its sides: triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, and so forth. The more sides you added, the closer it might seem that you were getting to the bounding circle—and yet, he insisted, in another sense, the farther away you would in fact be getting. Because a million-sided regular polygon, say, has, precisely, a million sides and a million angles, whereas a circle has none, or maybe at most one.
more here.
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