Accepting the universe : $b Essays in naturalismBurroughs, John
Philosophy
Accepting the universe : $b Essays in naturalism
Burroughs, John
Natural history; Natural history -- Philosophy; Philosophy; Science
Bergson says that we are in trouble the moment we think of a creator
and a thing created; in other words, the moment we apply to the
universe as a whole the concepts which our practical lives yield us.
The only alternative I see is to think of the universe as uncreated,
which, I confess, does not make the problem much easier. I try to
help myself out by saying that our concepts are formed in a world
in which we deal with parts and fragments, lines and angles on the
surface of a sphere, and not with the sphere as a whole. Our senses
do not reveal the earth to us as a globe, but as a boundless plain
with no under side; we find no limits, and if we continue our search
long enough, we come back to the place from which we set out, but
from the opposite direction.
When we try to think in terms of spheres and solar systems, our
everyday concepts avail us very little; in fact, they set us down
wrong-end up. We look at the moon or the sun and we say, Surely if
we were at the South Pole of either of these bodies, we should be as
truly on the under side of it as the fly is when it alights at the
South Pole of the globe in our study. We should be in a position
opposite to that which we should occupy at the North Pole. That every
point on the surface of a cosmic sphere should be on top, or rather
that there should be no top, and no bottom; that these concepts
should be abolished; that if two inhabited globes should come in
collision, each would seem to the people upon the other to be falling
down out of the heavens upon them; that out in sidereal space not
even the Huns could drop bombs, or send up balloons, because there
would be no up and no down--when we grasp these facts, I say, we are
at the end of our tether; we not only do not know “where we are at,”
but we find there is no “at.” Our minds can deal with the cosmos
only in an abstract or mathematical way. As a concrete fact even our
little earth is too much for us. Not merely too big, it contradicts
all our experience. If we could build a sphere a mile through, or
ten miles or a hundred miles, or ten thousand miles through, could
we stand upon it at the South Pole? When we think of the daily
revolutions of the earth upon its axis, we are compelled to think of
it as turning over, because it brings the sun above us by day and
beneath us by night, and hence the puzzle to the unlettered mind as
to why the lakes and ponds do not all spill out.
Among the heavenly bodies other laws prevail; there is motion without
friction or dissipation of energy; there is no body at rest; there
is no motion in right lines, but only in curved lines; there is no
beginning nor ending; there is only eternal progression; and this is
a condition of things that throws our mental adjustments all out of
gear. The problem of God, the problem of creation, the problem of
future life, throw our mental adjustments out of gear in the same way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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