Émile Boutroux Quote

Science is reduction. Mathematics is its ideal, its form par excellence, for it is in mathematics that assimilation, identification, is most perfectly realized. The universe, scientifically explained, would be a certain formula, one and eternal, regarded as the equivalent of the entire diversity and movement of things.

Translated by Fred Roth Well, Natural law in Science and Philosophy, Preface (p. 5), The Macmillan Co. 1914