Part of the blame rests with philosophy, which has often failed to comprehend the viewpoints of those rapidly developing sciences; on the other hand, part of the blame goes to the sciences, which were occupied more with conquering new territories than with securing and carefully integrating what had been gained. In short, through the fault of both sides a mutual alienation developed.

What happened was unavoidable given the rapidity of an advance in mobile warfare: communications broke down between front and staff. To the philosophers at headquarters, in the absence of bulletins [from the front], the situation became less and less clear; it is especially unfortunate that although Kant was still alive at the time of the first work on the fundamentally important non-Euclidean geometries, he received no bulletins about them – which [if he had received them] might have been of great benefit both to his system and to those geometries. At the front, the lack of communication could have been even more damaging if there hadn't fortuitously been a few leaders who made up for their lack of strategic schooling with native insight and clearsightedness: thanks to men like Gauss and Helmholtz as well as Riemann and Hertz, among many others, who combined outstanding talent in their specialties with great system-building power and a sureness of instinct for the big picture, by and large the right paths were followed.