Henry Adams: "All opinion founded on fact must be error, because the facts can never be complete, and their relations must be always infinite."
sure, but let's see how many arguments this wins you
Hejinian contexualizes this: Adams is responding to the "shocks of modernity," "a discrete series of challenges to, and ruptures with, continuities of belief, tradition, custom, habit, and the familiarities of diurnal rhythms"
"By the end of the nineteenth century, as Adams saw it, human visions of unity had been shattered under the pressures of multiplicity"
though Hejinian, perhaps as a corrective, notes that "capitalism [...] had been in development for several centuries" and that the "recording" of "multiplicity had been in progress since the Renaissance"