[Inverness, Macbeth's castle.]

Lady Macbeth {to Macbeth}:

Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant.

William Shakespeare
Macbeth, 1.5.54-56

  
Knowledge's lure. — A look through the portal of science affects passionate spirits like the magic of all magic; and in the process such spirits presumably become fantasists or, under propitious circumstances, poets: so vehement is their craving for the happiness of the knowledgeable. Doesn't it course through all your senses — this tone of sweet allure with which science proclaimed its glad tidings, in a hundred phrases and in the hundred and first and fairest: "Let delusion disappear! Then 'woe is me!' will also have disappeared; and with the 'woe is me' the woe will also go." (Marcus Aurelius)

Friedrich Nietzsche
Dawn
Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, #450
translated by Brittain Smith

  
Photo of Robert A. Heinlein,
L. Sprague de Camp, & Isaac Asimov
at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944

Deb Houdek Rule's site has
Robert Heinlein: Murder Suspect
by D. A. Houdek and G. E. Rule —
Los Angeles SF writers & fans in 1941,
in Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue
  

  
LitCrit at Troynovant
critiques in and around literary criticism

Aerospace at Troynovant
air & space travel & development

Science fiction & fantasy series
  

  
The intellectual methods of science do not differ in kind from those applied by the common man in his daily mundane reasoning. The scientist uses the same tools which the layman uses; he merely uses them more skillfully and cautiously. Understanding is not a privilege of the historians. It is everybody's business. In observing the conditions of his environment everybody is a historian.

Everybody uses understanding in dealing with the uncertainty of future events to which he must adjust his own actions. The distinctive reasoning of the speculator is an understanding of the relevance of the various factors determining future events. And ... action necessarily always aims at future and therefore uncertain conditions and this is always speculation.

Acting man looks, as it were, with the eyes of a historian into the future.

Ludwig von Mises
"The Epistemological Problems", S.8
Human Action
A Treatise on Economics  (1949; 3rd edition 1966)
[emphasis added]