Well-chosen.

Shishkin, Stream by a Forest Slope, 1880

The Permanence of Reverie

We have only to speak of an object to consider ourselves objective.  But by our first act of choice, the objective designates us more than we designate it, and what we consider our fundamental thoughts about the world are often a declaration of the mind.  At time we marvel at a chosen object; we amass hypotheses and reveries; thus we form convictions, which have the appearance of knowledge.  But their initial source is impure: the primary evidence is not a fundamental truth.  Indeed, scientific objectivity is possible only after one breaks with the immediate object, rejecting the temptation of the initial choice, checking and contradicting the thoughts aroused by the first observation.  Any objective method, appropriately verified, belies the initial contact with the object.  It must first scrutinize everything: sensation, common sense, even the most constant experience, etymology itself, for the word, which is meant to sing and to charm, seldom coincides with thought.  Objective thought does not gaze in wonderment: it must be ironic. Without this critical vigilance, we will never take a truly objective attitude. In the examination of men, equals, or brothers, sympathy is the basis of the method. But confronted with this inert world, which is not imbued with our life, which suffers none of our sorrows, and which is exalted with none of our joys, we must halt all effusion, we must restrain ourselves unmercifully. The axes of poetry and science are opposed from the start.  All that philosophy can hope is to make poetry and science complementary, to unite them as two well-chosen contraries.  We must thus oppose to the poetic mind’s effusiveness nature the taciturnity of the scientific mind, for which preliminary opposition is a healthy precaution.

Gaston Bachelard, from On Poetic Imagination and Reverie