Facts don’t tell the whole story

There is a passage in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, in which a gentlemen at one point says to a class of children, “Should you have wall-paper with horses on it?” To this, the children uniformly shout, “Yes!” (It would seem a perfectly good idea, wouldn’t it?). The gentlemen, however, happens to be a protector of the scientific thinking of the day, and thus he retorts, “NO! You should NEVER have wallpaper with horses on it, because where in real life do you see horses walk up and down walls! Never should you have in representation what you do not have in fact. Only facts count!”