Μὑρμηξ παντὁς νὁμος.
He said it. But Truth stirred within him, and under his breath he muttered “Eppur si muove....” This was overheard, and he was condemned (loneliness being much hated and dreaded by ants) to a solitary banishment.
Later philosophers, however, by using this same pendulum method, were enabled to find that the movements of sap in plants differed in rate according to the length of day, and later discovered that the expansion of water in hollow stems also followed these changes. By devising machines for registering these movements, they were enabled to prophesy with considerable success the amount of work to be got through on a given day, and so to render great aid to the smooth working of the body politic. Thus, gradually, the old ideas fell into desuetude among the educated classes—which, however, did not prevent the common people from remaining less than half-convinced and from regarding the men of science with suspicion and disapproval.
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We happen to be warm-blooded—to have had the particular problem faced by our philosophic ants solved for us during the passage of evolutionary time, not by any taking of thought on our part or on the part of our ancestors, but by the casual processes of variation and natural selection. But a succession of similar problems presses upon us. Relativity is in the air; it is so much in the air that it becomes almost stifling at times; but even so, its sphere so far has been the inorganic sciences, and biological relativity, though equally important, has been little mentioned.
We have all heard the definition of life as “one damn thing after another”; it would perhaps be more accurate to substitute some term such as relatedness for thing.
When I was a small boy, my mother wrote down in a little book a number of my infant doings and childish sayings, the perusal of which I find an admirable corrective to any excessive moral or intellectual conceit. What, for instance, is to be thought of a scientist of whom the following incident is recorded, even if the record refers to the age of four years?
I (for convenience one must assign the same identity to oneself at different ages, although again it is but a relative sameness that persists)—I had made some particularly outrageous statement which was easily proved false: to which proof, apparently without compunction, I answered, “Oh, well, I always exagg-erate when it’s a fine day....”
The converse of this I came across recently in a solemn treatise of psychology: a small girl of five or six, in the course of an “essay” in school, affirmed that the sun was shining and the day was fine; while as a matter of fact it had been continuously overcast and gloomy: on being pressed for a reason, she explained that she felt so happy that particular morning that she had been sure it was a fine day.