How can connections drawn by humans provide a sound basis for the discovery of natural phenomena, and especially physical laws? How, of all connections whatsoever, those that are drawn by us are conducive to making correct guesses about the physical world? Why, in particular, using mathematics in physics is so fruitful? How, more generally, do we explain the "'correspondence' ... between the human brain [/mind] and the physical world as a whole"? (Steiner 1998: 176) These are some of the ways Mark Steiner formulates the classical philosophical question: How do humans, who can only "see" things through the prism of their own thought, attain knowledge of the world? Speaking about physical discovery, Steiner cites Charles Peirce. In fact, he thinks that some of "Peirce's words are so apt" (ibid.: 74) that he cites them twice, both at the beginning and at the end of the chapter "Mathematics, Analogies, and Discovery in Physics" (1998). The twicecited passage is 7.680 of Peirce (1958). Steiner begins by citing the immediately preceding passages:But just so when we experience a long series of systematically connected phenomena, suddenly the idea of a mode of connection, of the system, springs up in our minds, is forced upon us, and there is no warrant for it and no apparent explanation of how we were led so to view it. You may say that we put this and that together; but what brought those ideas out of the depths of consciousness? On this idea, which springs out upon experience of part of the system, we immediately build expectations of what is to come and assume the attitude of watching for them. [