> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
You’re reading more than he wrote. Science is an abstraction, a model of our world that we use to make prediction. It is true that the model is not the world, but it is also true that we have made unquestionable progress in our models and understanding of the reality we inhabit. We just can predict and explain a lot more than we could a century ago.
