Verbatim quote · defining passage

“This formula goes some way toward providing an originary model for the much-celebrated awe that scientists themselves profess to feel when inquiring into the mysteries of nature: that awe is a moral experience generated by the scientist’s experience not of the object as a thing detached from human mimesis, but, on the contrary, the scientist’s sense that he or she is first in the community to experience the difference that scientific signification makes in tension with the originary sacred.”

— Eric Gans, Originary Science, Originary Memory Frankenstein and the Problem of Modern Science (Part 1 of 3) · Fall 2006 · Anthropoetics