The Round World

I HAVE a neighbor, a man now over eighty years of age, who has a philosophy of his own about most things, and who does not believe that the earth is round nor that it turns round; and he can prove it to you, to his own satisfaction, with his level on the floor. 1 confess I sympathize with him, and half hoped he could prove it to me, as I am turned topsy-turvy every time I try to see myself on a round globe; but I am also bound to confess that he did not quite convince me.

I fancy that all persons who think much about the matter have trouble to adjust their notion of a round world to their actual experience. After we have sailed round the world and seen its round shape eclipsing the moon, and seen the ships drop below the horizon at sea, we still fail to see ourselves (at least I do) as living on the surface of a sphere; by no force of imagination can I do so. The eye reports only a boundless plain, diversified by hills and mountains; and travel we never so far, we cannot find the under side of the sphere — we can never see ourselves as we see the house-fly crawling over the side of the globe in our room, and we wonder why we do not drop off or see the sky beneath us. Yet when we reach the South Pole, the sky is still overhead, the same as at the North. This is the contradiction that staggers our senses.

The trut his that as dwellers upon the earth, we are completely under the law of the sphere, so completely that we cannot get away from it even in imagination, without seeing ourselves involved in a world of hopeless contradictions. The law of the sphere is that there is no up and no down, no over and no under, no rising and no falling, apart from itself. Away from the earth, in empty sidereal space, we should be absolutely lost, and should not know whether we were right-side-up or not, standing on our heads or our heels, because we must experience a negation of all direction as we know it here. We might know our right hand from our left hand, but can we picture to ourselves whether we should be falling up or falling down, whether the stars should be over us or under us?

Or go to the other extreme,and fancy yourself at the centre of the earth; which way would your feet point, up or down? Which way would things fall? Try to think of the dilemma you would be in, if you could tunnel through the earth, when you came out on the other side! And what is curious about all this is that our experience with balls and spheres here does not prepare us for these contradictions. Every globe we see, even the sun and moon, has an upper and an under side. If we fancy ourselves on the moon we see the heavens above us at the North Pole, and below us at the South. Is not the fly crawling over the under side of the globe in our room in a reversed position? Yet we know from actual experience that, go where we will on the earth’s surface, we are right-side-up with care. We find no under side. The heavens are everywhere above us, and the ground is beneath us, and falling off the sphere seems and is impossible. We nowhere find ourselves in the position the Man in the Moon would appear to be in if we could see him searching for the South Pole. South Pole and North Pole are both the same so far as our relation to them is concerned.

The size of the globe, be it little or big, cannot alter the law of the globe. If we were to make a globe ten miles or a hundred or a thousand miles in diameter, it would still have a top and a bottom side, and if we placed the figure of a man at the South Pole his head would point down and we should have to tie him on.

When we get a flying-machine that will take us to the moon, I shall want to alight well up on the top side for fear I shall fall off. In fact, landing on the under side would seem a physical impossibility. I try to fancy how it would seem if we could alight there. Of course, the sky would still be overhead and we should look up to that bigger moon, the earth, from which we had just come on an upward flight. We go up to the moon or to Mars, and we turn round and look up to the point of our departure! It is the apparent contradiction that I cannot adjust my mind to; that up and down, over and under, can be abolished, that they are only forms of our experience, and that out in sidereal space they would have no meaning; that is something hard for us to realize. We apprehend it without comprehending it. Are all our notions thus relative? The globe is bigger than our minds. We cannot turn the cosmic laws round in our thoughts. We are adjusted to the sphere, not it to us.

If the moon were to break from its orbit and fall to the earth, its course would be downward, like that of the shooting stars. How would it seem to people on the moon, if there were people there?

This sense of contradiction that we feel in trying to adjust our minds to the idea of a round world, may be analogous to the difficulty we have in trying to reach an intellectual concept of the universe as a whole. Our minds are so constituted and disciplined by our experience that we look for the causes of every event or thing. We make a chain of causes, the end of which we never reach. A causeless event, or thing, we cannot think of any more than we can think of a stick with only one end. God is unthinkable, because He is causeless.

We cannot penetrate the final mystery of things, because behind every mystery is another mystery. What causes life? What started evolution? Why are you and I here? Who or what ordered the world as we see it ? We cannot help asking these questions, though we see when we try to take the first step that they are unanswerable. When we find the end of the under side of the sphere, we may hope to answer them. There is no ending, and no beginning, there is no limit to space or to time, though we make our heads ache trying to think how such can be the case. There is no final Cause in any sense that comes within the range of our experience in this world. We are prisoners of the sphere on which we live, and its bewildering contradictions are reflected in our mental lives as well.