Following a tangent on your theme, Blake:
I'm reading a book titled Literature and the Irrational; two quotes:
"What is the meaning of "scientific fact"? Obviously no such fact is given in any haphazard observation or in a mere accumulation of sense data. The facts of science always imply a theoretical, which means a symbollic, element. Many, if not most of those scientific facts which have changed the whole course of the history of sceince have been hypothetical facts before they become observable facts.
--Cassirer
"For something to exist in reality it must first exist in the mind."
--Michael Guiterres