Chapter 7, How to Choose Our Hypotheses, part 3

The ancient Hebrews used their imaginations very freely, and sometimes really very logically. And sometimes the free use of the imagination produced sensations in the eyes and ears as if of seeing and hearing. They considered this quite natural, as it really was. Many great mathematicians in modern Europe have had these sensations. The Hebrews called these sensations by a Hebrew word which is translated by the English word “angel,” from the Greek “angelos,” a messenger. The Hebrews were quite right. The sensations are messengers from the Great Unknown. They bring no information about outside facts. No angel tells you how many petals there are in a buttercup; if you want to know that, you are supposed to ask the buttercup itself. No angel tells you the price of sugar; you ought to ask your grocer. No angel tells you how to invest your money; you ought to ask your banker or your lawyer. There are people foolish enough to ask angels about investments, or about which horse will win a race; which is just as foolish as asking your banker in town how many blossoms there are on the rose tree in your country garden. It is not his business, and if he made a guess it would most likely turn out a wrong one. All that sort of thing is quackery and superstition.

But the angels do bring us very reliable information from a vast region of valuable truth about which most of us know very little as yet. They guide us how to frame our next provisional working hypothesis, how to choose the particular hypothesis which at our present stage of knowledge and development will be most illuminating for us. Some of the angels come during sleep; we call them dreams. Dreams sometimes suggest the best working hypothesis to experiment on next. More often they warn us against thinking upon some hypothetical basis which for the present will not suit us.