"The General idea is always an abstraction and, for that very reason, is some sort of negation of real life...human thought, and in consequence of this, science, can grasp and name only the general significance of real facts, their relations, their laws - in short, that which is permanent in their continual transformations - but never their material, individual side, palpitating, so to speak, with reality and life, and therefore fugitive and intangible...science comprehends the thought of the reality, not reality itself; the thought of life, not life. That is its limit, its only really insuperable limit, because it is founded on the very nature of thought, which is the only organ of science."

--Mikhael Bakunin, God and the State (NY : Dover, 1970)