Science Quote by Ernst Mach

Mach is doing something sly here: he flatters the dream as a form of experience, then demotes it with the cold instrument of “practical importance.” The line reads like a laboratory note written about the psyche. If dreams were “more regular, more connected, more stable” they’d matter the way measurements matter. The condition is the point. Dreams fail the basic standards of scientific usefulness: repeatability, coherence, durability. Mach isn’t merely dismissing them as nonsense; he’s diagnosing why they sit outside the economy of knowledge his era prized.

Context matters. Mach’s work helped push physics away from metaphysical comfort and toward what can be tied to sensation, description, and testable relations. In that climate, a phenomenon earns status when it can be organized into lawlike patterns. The quote smuggles in a theory of value: “importance” isn’t intrinsic; it’s granted by an epistemic culture that rewards stability and connection. A dream is vivid, sometimes even clarifying, but it can’t be rerun on demand. It doesn’t scale.

The subtext lands harder: human meaning-making is treated as an engineering problem. Regularity isn’t just a property of the world; it’s a requirement we impose so the world can be used. Mach suggests that if inner life behaved like outer nature, we’d exploit it similarly. The sting is that our most intimate narratives are disqualified not because they lack content, but because they refuse the discipline of method. In one sentence, Mach sketches the boundary line between private revelation and public knowledge.