Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other EssaysCarpenter, Edward
Philosophy
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays
Carpenter, Edward
Civilization; Crime; Evolution; Science
But then again on and beyond all these things--beyond the focussing and
photographing of rays, beyond the latent adaptations to the needs of
innumerable creatures, and the epitomising of ages of evolution--the
Human Eye has faculties even more far-reaching perhaps and wonderful. It
is the marvellous organ of human Expression. By the dilatations and
contractions of the iris, by the altering convexities of the lens and
the eyeball, and in a hundred other ways, it manages somehow to convey
intelligence of Command, Control, Power, of Pity, Love, Sympathy, and
all those myriad emotions which flit through the human mind--an endless
series--a perfect encyclopædia. It is difficult even to imagine the eye
without this power of language. And what other functions it may have it
is not necessary to inquire. Highly specialised though it is, it is
already obvious enough that to call it a Machine for focussing rays of
light is monstrously and ludicrously inadequate--even as it would be to
call the Heart (the very centre of emotion and life, and the symbol of
human love and courage) a common Pump.
Nature is an infinitude, and can at no point be circumscribed by the
human intellect. Nor obviously is there any sense in taking one little
portion of Nature and isolating it from the rest, and then describing it
exhaustively _as if_ it really were so isolated. A thousand mechanicians
will agree, as I have said, in their description of a machine, because
in fact they will agree to view the machine just in the one aspect of
its particular action; but ask a thousand people to describe one and the
same face--or, better still, get a thousand portrait-painters, skilled
in their art, to paint portraits of the same face--and you know
perfectly well that all the likenesses will be different. And why will
they be different? Simply because every face, however rude, has infinite
sides, infinite aspects, and each painter selects what he paints from
his own point of view. And the same is true of every object and process
in Nature.
Then if these things are true (you ask again) how is it that scientific
men _do_ arrive at definite conclusions, and do agree with each other so
far as they do?
It is, and obviously must be, by the method of isolation; by the method
of selecting certain aspects of the problems presented to them, and
ignoring others. For since _all_ the relations of any phenomenon of
Nature cannot possibly be compassed, the only way _must_ be to ignore
some and concentrate attention on others; and when there is a kind of
tacit agreement as to which aspects shall be passed over and which
considered, there is naturally an agreement in the results. Thus by this
method, waiving all other aspects of the problem, the Eye may be
described and defined as an optical instrument, the Heart as a common
Pump, and the Solar System as a neat illustration of certain mechanical
laws discovered by Galileo and Newton.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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