cast of my project, in itself and empirical not a speculative enterprise, thus be-
came more marked and apparent. Or, perhaps, it only became more uncertain:
"le perplexité" and "les embarras" of Diderot's "genre sérieux," invoked in
my ironical epigraph, were fairly well displayed. As with any science (and,
against all the protests of Materialists, Realists, Positivists, Critical Rational-
ists, and, more recently, crazed Hyper-textualists, I regard my work as some
sort of science), the deeper you get in, the odder things begin to look. What-
ever we are moving toward, it is not omega, an asymptote, or a theory of
everything.

But if Everything In General is out of reach, and likely to stay there, not
everything in particular is. The repeating theme that emerges from these mis-
cellaneous "further essays," and which constitutes amid their miscellany their
common aim and subject, has to do with that most ancient, most obsessive,
and, as usually framed, most misleading of epistemological concerns: the rela-
tion between abstract and concrete knowledge. Generalizations and cases, laws
and instances, universals and particulars, knowings-that and knowings-how,
synoptic visions and immediate observations, the world around here and the
world overall--"erklren" and "verstehen," "savoir," and "connaître," "explana-
tion" and "understanding"--are normally opposed to one another as last analy-
sis metaphilosophical choices, once made, forever in place; fatalities of reason.
Here, however, they are regarded as cooked up and concocted interpretive
styles, meaning-seeking strategies to be used when usable, to be ignored when
not: ways in which, to one end or another, thought is composed, sense made.

The notion that the surer grasp of unshapely and incongruent, even unique,
particulars is as proper an aim of science as the abstractive formulation of ex-
ceptionless regularities--and is, often enough, more illuminating as well--has
grown steadily more acceptable over the last quarter century as rationalism
stumbled, positivism evaporated, and "the prism face of Newton" (the image
is Wordsworth's) faded from view. The notion that all knowledge aspires to
the condition of mathematical physics, or, even less plausibly, to diagram-
matic economics, lacks the air of simple obviousness that it had even a few
short years ago. Everything, from the philosophical reconsideration of the na-
ture of natural law to the spread of perspectival, observer-dependent explana-
tion, has strengthened the claims of case-based knowledge to scientific
standing. "Heaven in a grain of sand" is no longer just a pantheistic trope.

It is, however, still a trope, and one, in fact, I have abused before to put off
difficult questions. Whatever its suggestive power, multum-in-parvo imagery
leaves the central issue rhetorically glossed over: how does one move among

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