"Our analysis which has hitherto been qualitative, must become quantitative; we must cease to be empirical, and become scientific: in criticism as in other matters, the test that decides between science and empiricism is this: `Can you say, not only of what kind, but how much?' If you cannot weigh, measure, number your results, however you may be convinced yourself, you must not hope to convince others, or claim the position of an investigator; you are merely a guesser, a propounder of hypotheses."
Frederick Gard Fleay (1831-1909), British Shakespearian scholar in On metrical tests as applied to dramatic poetry (1874).
quoted in Social Science Quotations (1991) New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.
[Socrates speaks:] "Answer me this... The same magnitudes seem greater to the eye from near at hand than they do from a distance. This is true of thickness and also of number, and sounds of equal loudness seem greater near at hand that at a distance. If now our happiness consisted in doing, I mean in choosing, greater lengths and avoiding smaller, where would lie salvation? In the art of measurement or in the impression made by appearances? Haven't we seen that the appearance leads us astray and throws us into confusion so that, in our actions and our choices between great and small, we are constantly accepting and rejecting the same things, whereas the metric art would have cancelled the effect of the impression, and by revealing the true state of affairs would have caused the soul to live in peace and quiet and abide in the truth, thus saving our life? Faced with these considerations, would people agree that our salvation would lie in the art of measurement?"
Plato (427-347 B.C.) Protagoras, 347
Quotations. … Rasch Measurement Transactions, 1988, 2:2 passim
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