Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.

If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.

Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.

The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.