Nothing could be easier, you would say, than to distinguish the things man has made from those he has merely stumbled upon and found. The suns and their satellites, with the laws of their turning; the earth, with its seas and continents and the ways of its winds and weather--surely no man took thought on these things to make them. Whereas, from the first bit of flint chipped to serve a human need to all our world has now to show of instruments of power and works of art we have a record of human ideals wrought in material, while man, surrounded by his handiwork, has come to live more and more under laws of his own making. Aristotle thought the difference between products of nature and works of art so plain that he need not pause to explain it. The years that have passed since then have developed no better mind than Aristotle’s, no keener wit than Plato’s, but they have brought us a wealth of experience--of an experience at once enlightening and disillusioning, until Jetzt sind wir so klug und witzig Es verblutet uns das Herz. We are no longer sure of very much, and among the things we are most doubtful about is just this distinction between what man has made and what he has found. To prove this, no one need go further afield than just to consider himself. Surely I may say of myself, my character, my private life that it is man-made, for am not I the man that made it? It expresses all my ideals so far as I could realize them, and never would it have been just what it is had I not moulded it that way. And yet, who among us has not sat up of nights with that strange being he calls himself, and wondered however he came to bring so uncompanionable a companion home with him and where the devil he found him? Ernst Mach tells an amusing anecdote at his own expense. One day he was mounting the steps of a bus when he noticed at the other end of the aisle a man’s face peering into his. He had no more than asked himself “Where have I seen that degenerate looking pedagogue before?”--when he discovered he was looking into a mirror.