Science Quote by Walter Rudolf Hess

You can hear the lab-bench impatience in Hess's phrasing: "Exact information" is not a mood, it's a method. He stakes a claim for rigor by narrowing the acceptable path to knowledge down to one painstaking procedure: serial histological sectioning. No shortcuts, no armchair theorizing, no trusting surface anatomy to explain deep function. The sentence is almost puritanical in its devotion to process, and that austerity is the point.

Context matters. Hess worked in an era when neuroscience was pivoting from speculative localization (the temptation to map complex behaviors onto neat brain "centers") toward experimentally anchored physiology and anatomy. The "deep sections" he invokes are where the messy, consequential machinery lives: hypothalamus, midbrain, the circuits that govern autonomic life and basic drives. They are also literally hard to access. The subtext is a rebuke to anyone claiming functional insight without having earned it through tissue, stain, microscope, and the slog of reconstruction.

"Only obtained" is the power move. Hess isn't merely recommending a technique; he is policing epistemology. Serial sections imply continuity and three-dimensional truth: you don't glance at a slice and invent a story, you track structures across slices until the pattern becomes unavoidable. It's a statement about humility in the face of biological complexity, but also about authority: the scientist who endures the tedious labor gets to speak with "exact" confidence.

Read this way, the line doubles as a manifesto for modern neuroscience's bargain: understanding emerges less from flashes of genius than from systematic, often monotonous, work that forces nature to reveal its wiring.