A New Era of Thought

by Charles Howard Hinton

We form a set of conceptions in the mind, and the relations between these conceptions give us relations which we find actually vibrating in the world around us. But the conceptions themselves are essentially artificial.

We have a conception of atoms; but no one supposes that atoms actually exist. We suppose a force varying inversely as the square of the distance; but no one supposes such a mysterious thing to really be in nature. And when we come to the region of descriptive science, when we come to simple observation, we do not find ourselves any better provided with a real knowledge of nature. If, for instance, we think of a plant, we picture to ourselves a certain green shape, of a more or less definite character. This green shape enables us to recognise the plant we think of, and to describe it to a certain extent. But if we inquire into our imagination of it, we find that our mental image very soon diverges from the fact. If, for instance, we cut the plant in half, we find cells and tissues of various kinds. If we examine our idea of the plant, it has merely an external and superficial resemblance to the plant itself. It is a mental drawing meeting the real plant in external appearance; but the two things, the plant and our thought of it, come as it were from different sides—they just touch each other as far as the colour and shape are concerned, but as structures and as living organisms they are as wide apart as possible.

Of course by observation and study the image of a plant which we bear in our minds may be made to resemble a plant as found in the fields more and more. But the agreement with nature lies in the multitude of points superadded on to the notion of greenness which we have at first—there is no natural starting-point where the mind meets nature, and whence they can travel hand in hand.

It almost seems as if, by sympathy and feeling, a human being was easier to know than the simplest object. To know any object, however simple, by the reason and observation requires an endless process of thought and looking, building up the first vague impression into something like in more and more respects. While, on the other hand, in dealing with human beings there is an inward sympathy and capacity for knowing which is independent of, though called into play by, the observation of the actions and outward appearance of the human being.

But for the purpose of knowing we must leave out these human relationships. They are an affair of instinct and inherited unconscious experience. The mind may some day rise to the level of these inherited apprehensions, and be able to explain them; but at present it is far more than overtasked to give an account of the simplest portions of matter, and is quite inadequate to give an account of the nature of a human being.

Asking, then, what there was which I could know, I found no point of beginning. There were plenty of ways of accumulating observations, but none in which one could go hand in hand with nature.

A child is provided in the early part of its life with a provision of food adapted for it. But it seemed that our minds are left without a natural subsistence, for on the one hand there are arid mathematics, and on the other there is observation, and in observation there is, out of the great mass of constructed mental images, but little which the mind can assimilate. To the worker at science of course this crude and omnivorous observation is everything; but if we ask for something which we can know, it is like a vast mass of indigestible material with every here and there a fibre or thread which we can assimilate.

In this perplexity I was reduced to the last condition of mental despair; and in default of finding anything which I could understand in nature, I was sufficiently humbled to learn anything which seemed to afford a capacity of being known.

And the objects which came before me for this endeavour were the simple ones which will be plentifully used in the practical part of this book. For I found that the only assertion I could make about external objects, without bringing in unknown and unintelligible relations, was this: I could say how things were arranged. If a stone lay between two others, that was a definite and intelligible fact, and seemed primary. As a stone itself, it was an unknown somewhat which one could get more and more information about the more one studied the various sciences. But granting that there were some things there which we call stones, the way they were arranged was a simple and obvious fact which could be easily expressed and easily remembered.

And so in despair of being able to obtain any other kind of mental possession in the way of knowledge, I commenced to learn arrangements, and I took as the objects to be arranged certain artificial objects of a simple shape. I built up a block of cubes, and giving each a name I learnt a mass of them.