This being so, what is to prevent us from believing that, once certain
adjustments are made in the mental sausage-machine, we shall discover
that what we once found impossibly tough meat will pass smoothly
through and become done up into the most satisfactory of sausages?
In other words, that the values are there if we choose to make
them--an Euckenish doctrine which, for all that it arouses instinctive
suspicion, may none the less be true.
But even when we have made all possible discounts of this kind, evolved
the smoothest-running machinery, converted the raw and meaty material
of being into every conceivable kind of tidy sausage, the fact remains
that there are feats beyond the power of our machine--beyond its power
because of the very quality of its being.
We live at a certain rhythm in time, at a certain level of size and
space; beyond certain limits, events in the outer world are not
directly appreciable by the ordinary channels of sense, although a
symbolic picture of them may be presented to us by the intellect.
When we are listening to the organ, sometimes there come notes which
are on the border-line between sound and feeling: their separate
vibrations are distinguishable and pulse through us, and the more the
vibrations are separable, the more they are felt as mechanical shocks,
the less as sound. However, we know perfectly well that all sounds as
a matter of fact depend on vibratory disturbance, and that it is only
some peculiarity of the registering machinery, in ear or brain, which
enables us to hear a note as continuous.
Still more remarkable are the facts of vision. As I write I see
the tulips in my garden, red against the green grass: the red is a
continuous sensation; but the physicists appear to be justified in
telling us that the eye is being bombarded every second with a series
of waves, not the few hundred or thousand that give us sound, but the
half-billion or so which conspire to illuminate our vision.
With sound, we alter the frequency of the waves and we get a difference
of tone which seems to be merely a difference of more or less: but
alter the frequency of light-waves, and the whole quality of the
sensation changes, as when I look from the tulips to the sky. The
change of registering mechanism is here more profound than the change
in outer event.
Or again, to choose an example that depends more on size than rhythm,
how very difficult it is to remember that the pressure of air on our
bodies is not the uniform gentle embrace of some homogeneous substance,
but the bombardment of an infinity of particles. The particles are not
even all alike: some are of oxygen, others of nitrogen, of carbonic
acid gas, of water vapour. They are not all travelling at uniform
speeds; collisions are all the time occurring, and the molecules are
continuously changing their rate of travel as they clash and bump.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account