“Theories are the mighty soap-bubbles with which the grown-up children of science amuse themselves while the honest vulgar stand gazing in stupid admiration, and dignify these learned vagaries with the name of wisdom!”
Irving’s fictional historian mocks intellectual systems that impress spectators through confidence and complexity while remaining vulnerable to later correction.
Source details
Knickerbocker's History of New York, Book I, Chapter II, Project Gutenberg #13042. Exact-witness review corrects the inherited broad Book I locator: the “mighty soap-bubbles” sentence closes the chapter’s comic survey of competing cosmogonic theories. It belongs to Diedrich Knickerbocker’s satirical pseudo-history and anti-pedantic rhetoric, not Irving rejecting science as a method.