Bateson 29: "[S]cience is a way of perceiving and making what we may call 'sense' of our percepts. But perception operates only upon difference. All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference, and all perception of difference is limited by threshold. Differences that are too slight or too slowly presented are not perceivable. They are not food for perception."
"It follows that what we, as scientists, can percieve is always limited by threshold. That is, what is subliminal will not be grist for our mill. Knowledge at any given moment will be a function of the thresholds of our available means of perception. The invention of the microscope or the telescope or of means of measuring time to the fraction of a nanosecond or weighing quantities of matter to millionths of a gram--all such improved devices of perception will disclose what was utterly unpredictable from the levels of perception that we could achieve before that discovery. [Nevertheless], we cannot predict into the next dimension of the microscopic, the astronomically distant, or the geologically ancient."
Science "is limited in its ability to collect the outward and visible signs of whatever may be truth"