Interesting Thoughts on Research

Similarly throughout all their political thinking. Proximate causes and proximate results are alone contemplated; and there is scarcely any consciousness that the original causes are often numerous and widely different from the apparent cause, and that beyond each immediate result there will be multitudinous remote results, most of them quite incalculable. - Herbert Spencer

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_1/May_1872/The_Study_of_Sociology_I