The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination; we cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in making manifest the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can; and it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.
—"Learning and Science."
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
How far is it permissible to let theory outrun fact? Zeno's paradox was a commonplace of an older logic: Give a turtle a head start and it is never overtaken by Achilles. Cerebral electrophysiology has much promise if exploited in the ways of science, little if tempted too far into speculation as a substitute for reality. Judged by published accounts of the various symposia that