A New Era of Thought

by Charles Howard Hinton

Again, with light itself the differences of colour are explained as being the effect on us of rays of different rates of vibration. Now a vibration is essentially this, a series of arrangements of matter which follow each other in a closed order, so that when the set has been run through, the first arrangement follows again. The whole theory of light is an account of arrangements of the particles in the transmitting medium, only the arrangements alter—are not permanent in any one characteristic, but go through a complete cycle of varieties.

Again, when the movements of the heavenly bodies are deduced from the theory of universal gravitation, what we primarily do is to take account of arrangement; for the law of gravity connects the movements which the attracted bodies tend to make with their distances, that is, it shows how their movements depend on their arrangement. And if gravity as a force is to be explained itself, the suppositions which have been put forward resolve it into the effect of the movements of small bodies; that is to say, gravity, if explained at all, is explained as the result of the arrangement and altering arrangements of small particles.

Again, to take the idea which proceeding from Goethe casts such an influence on botanical observation. Goethe (and also Wolf) laid down that the parts of a flower were modified leaves—and traced the stages and intermediate states between the ordinary green leaf and the most gorgeous petal or stamen or carpel, so unlike a leaf in form and function.

Now the essential value in this conception is, that it enables us to look, upon these different organs of a plant as modifications of one and the same organ—it enables us to think about the different varieties of the flower head as modifications of one single plant form. We can trace correspondences between them, and are led to possible explanations of their growth. And all this is done by getting rid of pistil and stamen as separate entities, and looking on them as leaves, and their parts due to different arrangement of the leaf structure. We have reduced these diverse objects to a common element, we have found the unit by whose arrangements the whole is produced. And in this department of thought, as also to take another instance, in chemistry, to understand is practically this: we find units (leaves or atoms) combinations of which account for the results which we see. Thus we see that that which the mind essentially apprehends is arrangement.

And this holds over the whole range of mental work, from the simplest observation to the most complex theory. When the eye takes in the form of an external object there is something more than a sense impression, something more than a sensation of greenness and light and dark. The mind works as well as the sense, and these sense impressions are definitely grouped in what we call the shape of the object. The essential act of perceiving lies in the apprehension of a shape, and a shape is an arrangement of parts. It does not matter what these parts are; if we take meaningless dots of colour and arrange them we obtain a shape which represents the appearance of a stone or a leaf to a certain degree. If we want to make our representation still more like, we must treat each of the dots as in themselves arrangements, we must compose each of them by many strokes and dots of the brush. But even in this case we have not got anything else besides arrangement. The ultimate element, the small items of light and shade or of colour, are in themselves meaningless; it is in their arrangement that the likeness of the representation consists.

Thus, from a drawing to our notion of the planetary system, all our contact with nature lies in this, in an appreciation of arrangement.

Hence to prepare ourselves for the understanding of nature, we must “arrange.” In virtue of our activity in making arrangements we prepare ourselves to do what is called understand nature. Or we may say, that which we call understanding nature is to discern something similar in nature to that which we do when we arrange elements into compounded groups.

Now if we study arrangement in the active way, we must have something to arrange; and the things we work with may be either all alike, or each of them varying from every other.

If the elements are not alike then we are not studying pure arrangement; but our knowledge is affected by the compound nature of that with which we deal. If the elements are all alike, we have what we call units. Hence the discipline preparatory for the understanding of nature is the active arrangement of like units.

And this is very much the case with all educational processes; only the things chosen to arrange are in general words, which are so complicated and carry such a train of association that, unless the mind has already acquired a knowledge of arrangement, it is puzzled and hampered, and never gets a clear apprehension of what its work is.