"In all of modern civilization, the discovery of a new principle arises as the resolution of a devastating paradox of the ontological form typified by that of Plato's Parmenides.

On the one side, we have the systematic belief which, up to that point, has satisfied our available tests for truthfulness. However, we are, at the same time, confronted by evidence whose reality we must accept, by the same standard we accept our established belief. This is evidence which could not exist within the bounds of the universe as these were defined by our previously established system of beliefs.

The attempt to juxtapose these two distinct, immiscible pieces of past and new evidence, creates a devastating form of scientific-epistemological paradox. I have come to prefer the estimate of the Earth's meridian, provided by the experimental method of Eratosthenes, as the pedagogically suitable example of the discovery of principle, as otherwise expressed by the treatment of curvature in the leading work of Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. In Classical forms of art, the same kind of paradox is known as metaphor. I have insisted that, to understand science, we must recognize paradoxes of this form, as expressions of the same type of problem represented by true metaphor within the domains of Classical forms of poetry, tragedy, music, and of plastic art such as that of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael Sanzio.

Initially, such paradoxes confront the mind with the awesome vastness of the unknown. On principle, no deductive-inductive method could provide a solution for such metaphors. The objective of the thinker caught in maelstrom, is twofold. First, he must resolve the confusion in a manner which is prohibited by the empiricists, Immanuel Kant, and the positivists. He must generate a tentative new principle of knowledge respecting the universe. Second, he must devise an experiment which demonstrates, or the refutes the efficient presence of that principle in nature. The result of an experimentally validated discovery of principle, of this sort, as Riemann was the first to put this problem in a comprehensible form, is a sweeping reconstruction of the preestablished, general hypothesis, by a new such hypothesis. This new hypothesis then underlies the new way in which we select and construct those propositions which the hypothesis will, in the future, permit us to select as theorems...

In Classical art, as typified by Wolfgang Mozart's discovery of a new general principle for motivic thorough-composition in music, all great art expresses the exact same principle I have just described for validated fundamental discoveries of principle in physical science."

-- from "Michael Novak, Calvinist? -- 'Not by marketplace alone!'", by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., Executive Intelligence Review, July 4, 1997