close-reasoning

Updated: May 6, 2025

There is, to be sure, no direct evidence preserved to show that Anaxagoras conceived the world to present such a figure as this, but what we know of that philosopher's close-reasoning, logical mind gives some warrant to the assumption gratuitous though in a sense it be that the author of the theory of the moon's phases had not failed to ask himself what must be the form of that terrestrial body which could cast the tenuous shadow of the Milky Way.

Edward Huntington Williams - A History of Science — Volume 1