If now we supposed that what held good for movements held good for tensions of the same nature as the movements, these results would be in exact accordance with our suppositions. If a twisting movement attracts its image twisting movement, will a twist attract its image twist by means of its effect on the medium in which it is, and on which it exerts tension? This point must be left undecided.
Casting Out the Self.
The words which I have chosen as the title of this paper are the expression for a process which has been asserted to be one that occurs alike in our mental and in our moral life. It has so happened that in certain of my own inquiries I have applied this process; and the details may be of interest. But I must warn the reader not to expect any wide views on life, or far-reaching thoughts, or any of the warmth of human affairs. What I think about is Space; and it is the application of the principle of casting out the self in attaining a knowledge of Space about which I have something to say.
And, firstly, as a bit of absolute human experience is never without value, but that which we make up is often so, I may as well cast the fear of ridicule aside and enable the reader to take in, in a few lines, the exact commencement of my inquiry.
The beginning of it was this. I gradually came to find that I had no knowledge worth calling by that name, and that I had never thoroughly understood anything which I had heard. I will not go into the matter further; simply this was what I found, and at a time when I had finished the years set apart for acquiring knowledge, and was far removed from contact with learned men. I could not take up my education again, but although I regretted my lost opportunities I determined to know something. With this view I tried to acquire knowledge in various ways, but in all of them knowledge was too impalpable for me to get hold of it. And I would earnestly urge all students to make haste in acquiring real knowledge while they are in the way with those that can impart it; and not rush on too quickly, thinking that they can get knowledge afterwards. For out in the world knowledge is hard to find.
At length I came to find that the only thing I could know was of this kind. If, for instance, there were several people in a room, I could not know them themselves, for they were too infinitely complicated for my mind to grasp; but I could know if they were at right or left hand of one another, close together, or far apart. And the same of, to take another instance, botanical specimens in a book. I could not grasp the specimens—each was too infinitely complicated, and each part too infinitely complex—but I could tell which specimen was next which.
Accordingly, being desirous to learn something thoroughly, and since, in the arrangement of any different objects, there was such a lot of ignorance introduced by the objects being different—each bringing in its own ignorance and feeling of bewilderment—I determined to learn an arrangement of a number of objects as much alike as possible.
Accordingly I took a number of cubes, which were as simple objects as I could get, arranged them in a large block, and proceeded to learn how they were placed with regard to each other. In order to learn them I gave each of them a name. The name meant the particular cube in the particular position.
Thus, taking any three names, I could say, about the three cubes denoted, how they were placed with regard to one another: one, say, would be straight above the first with four intervening, the third would touch the second on the right hand, or some similar arrangement.