To fully appreciate the predicament classical physics had fallen into, consider the debate as to how the medium of an air cavity inside a basic telescope could be anything but air, and how and why some sort of luminiferous ether could not only find its way inside, and if so, how it could be possibly moving along with the earth, when sometime earlier, that same ether would not be moving prior to the earth's arrival into that region of space.

This is ground zero for almost everything science has blundered into today, even perhaps the transistor.  It was really the first time the great modern thinkers of science began to unanimously embrace mathematical extension:  the electromagnetic equations of Maxwell, thermodynamics, the periodic table, quantum theory, and a host of others.  I can't tell you if the development of the transistor was predicated on abstract and imaginary positive holes in a germanium layer, or if that came later, but what seemed not so common sense and against the traditional grain, was making headway.

Indeed, just as the great thinkers drifted away from alchemy, they eventually abandoned ontology.  The difference is, alchemy was just a ruse, ontology is the fundamental study of fundamental substance.

Remember this.  When you chose to discard meanings relating that which you can touch with your fingers, by claiming allegiance to a higher logic over your otherwise said-to-be simple-minded beliefs, and then reminded by the experts, in their defense of their abstract beliefs, that "Again, this is an intuitive paradox that humans cannot resolve because it seems contradictory . . . though mathematically it derives from a higher logic than we are commonly familiar with in our limited world.", ask them how limited their world is which cannot explain those other things abstract and common, such as dreams.