Armed with only empirical observation and what we can see in controlled environments, we have often shown a regrettable tendency to empty the cosmos of its life.

Metaphysics might just be what physicists speculate about in one generation, as beyond current empirical observation, but which becomes part of physics in the next, as experimental techniques improve.

Those early ideas were founded through abstract, philosophical reasoning rather than experimentation and empirical observation and represented only one line of thought among many.

His edition contained many corrections and new information based on empirical observation.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries archaeological typologies continued to be constructed using a combination of empirical observation and intuition.