The following remarks are given at the end of Einstein's Forward to Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems -- Ptolemaic & Copernican by Galileo Galilei, translated by Stillman Drake, 1967, University of California Press.

"It has often been maintained that Galileo became the father of modern science by replacing the speculative, deductive method with the empirical and experimental method. I believe, however, that this interpretation would not stand close scrutiny. There is no empirical method without speculative concepts and systems; and there is no speculative thinking whose concepts do not reveal, on closer investigation, the empirical materiel from which they stem. To put into sharp contrast the empirical and the deductive attitude is misleading, and was entirely foreign to Galileo. Actually it was not until the nineteenth century that logical (mathematical) systems whose structures were completely independent of any empirical content had been cleanly extracted. Moreover, the experimental methods at Galileo's disposal were so imperfect that only the boldest speculation could possibly bridge the gaps between the empirical data. (For example, there existed no means to measure times shorter than a second.) The antithesis Empiricism vs. Rationalism does not appear as a controversial point in Galileo's work. Galileo opposes the deductive methods of Aristotle and his adherents only when he considers their premises arbitrary or untenable, and he does not rebuke his opponents for the mere fact of using deductive methods. In the first dialogue, he emphasizes in several passages that according to Aristotle, too, even the most plausible deduction must be put aside if it is incompatible with empirical findings. His endeavors are not so much directed at "factual knowledge" as at "comprehension." But to comprehend is essentially to draw conclusions from an already accepted logical system." (pp. xvii-xix)