‘Dear me! We Tooks and Brandybucks, we can’t live long on the heights.’

‘No,’ said Merry. ‘I can’t. Not yet, at any rate. But at least, Pippin, we can now see them, and honour them. It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not. I am glad that I know about them, a little.’

— Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck, in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings, 1139

“Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.” — Gandalf the White to Peregrin Took

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers: Being the Second Part of the Lord of the Rings, 780

We should also remember that the rules of induction have lent their support throughout the ages to beliefs that are contrary to those of science. Astrology has been sustained for 3000 years by empirical evidence confirming the predictions of horoscopes. This represents the longest chain of historically known empirical generalizations. For many prehistoric centuries the theories embodied in magic and witchcraft appeared to be strikingly confirmed by events in the eyes of those who believed in magic and witchcraft. Lecky rightly points out that the destruction of belief in witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was achieved in the face of an overwhelming, and still rapidly growing, body of evidence for its reality. Those who denied that witches existed did not attempt to explain this evidence at all, but successfully urged that it be disregarded. Glanvill, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, not unreasonably denounced this method as unscientific, on the ground of the professed empiricism of contemporary science. Some of the unexplained evidence for witchcraft was indeed buried for good, and only struggled painfully to light two centuries later when it was eventually recognized as the manifestation of hypnotic powers.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 168

“The Elves may fear the Dark Lord, and they may fly before him, but never again will they listen to him or serve him. And here in Rivendell there live still some of his chief foes: the Elven-wise, lords of the Eldar from beyond the furthest seas. They do not fear the Ringwraiths, for those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power.'

‘I thought that I saw a white figure that shone and did not grow dim like the others. Was that Glorfindel then?'

‘Yes, you saw him for a moment as he is upon the other side: one of the mighty of the Firstborn.’

— Gandalf and Frodo in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 290

“[Dynamic] relationships are not only more important than the entities related, but… ontologically prior to them — so that what we call ‘things’ arise out of the web of interconnectedness, not the web out of the things.”

— Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 1224

It is the normal practice of scientists to ignore evidence which appears incompatible with the accepted system of scientific knowledge, in the hope that it will eventually prove false or irrelevant. The wise neglect of such evidence prevents scientific laboratories fron being plunged forever into a turmoil of incoherent and futile efforts to verify false allegations. But there is, unfortunately, no rule by which to avoid the risk of occasionally disregarding thereby true evidence which conflicts (or seems to conflict) with the current teachings of science. During the eighteenth century the French Academy of Science stubbornly denied the evidence for the fall of meteorites, which seemed massively obvious to everybody else. Their opposition to the superstitious beliefs which popular tradition attached to such heavenly intervention blinded them to the facts in question.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 138

[Despite] our always contributing to the reality we experience, there is something apart from ourselves to which we can be true — that reality, in other words, is not purely made up by the brain. There is a relationship there — something to be true to. Assuming there is something there to know implies that some understandings will inevitably be better than others. And since each hemisphere provides a different understanding of it, it is perfectly coherent — and indeed necessary — to ask which is superior. (The validity of the question is not affected by the observation that we can, and may be best to, use both.) If a pilot is flying blind and has two navigation systems to rely on, each of which, though they differ, provides significant information, the criterion for having to prefer one over the other is clear: following which one is less likely to lead to a crash. Or again, as a piece of music cannot be experienced without a player, who inflects what it is that we hear, there is nonetheless such a thing as a better or worse performance, one that is more or less faithful to the potential enshrined in the piece — a potential that is, essentially, the piece of music, and becomes realised in every true performance, The arbiter, then, in either case, is the experience of the whole embodied person as he or she responds to a more, or less, accurate — a richer, or poorer — account of the world.

— Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 1:379–80.

We may… assert that the ontological judgments of the early ecumenical creeds were the only satisfying and indeed logical outcome of the claims of the [New Testament] read together with the Old. That is to say, for a Christian faith that upholds the unity of the Bible and the continuing authority of the [Old Testament], the one God is Trinity in himself, affirmed on the basis of his economic expression. There is no other way to justify the claims about and worship of the fully human Jesus Christ within an OT framework. It is likewise with the Spirit: given the authority of the OT, to recognize the “personhood” of the Spirit in coordination with the claims of the NT regarding the Spirit’s inseparability from Jesus Christ in worship and in presence is to affirm that the Spirit, too, is of the “same essence” as the Father and the Son. For the church to turn its back on the creeds is to turn its back upon the OT. So, too, to turn its back upon the OT is to loosen entirely the restraints that operate in the creedal formulations of the Trinitarian nature of the one Lord God. To speak about the one Lord God of the OT as Father, Son, and Spirit requires that this one God is in fact triune and, conversely, that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are of one and the same essence with respect to their reality, which, in turn, is the ground of worship.

— C. Kavin Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” reprinted in Method, Meaning, and Context in New Testament Studies, 147

James C. Scott’s four rules of thumb that “could make development planning less prone to disaster:”

1. Take small steps.
2. Favor reversibility.
3. Plan on surprises.
4. Plan on human inventiveness.

— Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 345

Why, then, the unscientific scorn for practical knowledge? There are at least three reasons for it, as far as I can tell. The first is the “professional” reason mentioned earlier: the more the cultivator knows, the less the importance of the specialist and his institutions. The second is the simple reflex of high modernism: namely, a contempt for history and past knowledge. As the scientist is always associated with the modern and the indigenous cultivator with the past that modernism will banish, the scientist feels that he or she has little to learn from that quarter. The third reason is that practical knowledge is represented and codified in a form uncongenial to scientific agriculture. From a narrow scientific view, nothing is known until and unless it is proven in a tightly controlled experiment. Knowledge that arrives in any form other than through the techniques and instruments of formal scientific procedure does not deserve to be taken seriously. The imperial pretense of scientific modernism admits knowledge only if it arrives through the aperture that the experimental method has constructed for its admission. Traditional practices, codified as they are in practice and in folk sayings, are seen presumptively as not meriting attention, let alone verification. And yet, as we have seen, cultivators have devised and perfected a host of techniques that do work, producing desirable results in crop production, pest control, soil preservation, and so forth. By constantly observing the results of their field experiments and retaining those methods that succeed, the farmers have discovered and refined practices that work, without knowing the precise chemical or physical reasons why they work. In agriculture, as in many other fields, “practice has long preceded theory.” And indeed some of these practically successful techniques, which involve a large number of simultaneously interacting variables, may never be fully understood by the techniques of science.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 305–06