In these words of Huygens it must strike us how he first provides an explanation for a series of phenomena as if this explanation were induced from the phenomena themselves. After he has drawn quite definite conclusions from it, he then derives its necessity from quite other principles – namely, from a certain method of thinking, accepting this as it is, unquestioned and unalterably established. We are here confronted with an ‘unlogic’ characteristic of human thinking during its state of isolation from the dynamic substratum of the world of the senses, an unlogic which one encounters repeatedly in scientific argumentation once one has grown aware of it. In circles of modern thinkers where such awareness prevails (and they are growing rapidly to-day) the term ‘proof of a foregone conclusion’ has been coined to describe this fact.¹