Your Nature and Mine

I

DURING the regular marital inspection at breakfast one morning, my wife discovered that the bridge of my glasses had become crooked. With judicious bending it was straightened. As I set off to work I found to my amazement that I had become a dwarf. I felt the way Alice did when she nibbled the Wonderland mushroom and got her chin tangled with her toes. Knowing that this magic quality was not yet listed among the virtues of shredded wheat, I hastily removed my glasses — only to discover that I was now a giant in sevenleague boots. It was most exhilarating. But it raised a curious question. Which was the real me, the stalker or the creeper? Perhaps the strangest thing about the experience was the unavoidable realization, quite apart from any laudable feeling of modesty, that there was no real me. I became surprisingly uncertain of myself as a physical object.

You and I have been taught that Nature is impersonal. We are standing before a Van Gogh landscape. You are a trained artist and I have a low amateur standing. Neither doubts that we are seeing two entirely different pictures. But when we think of the canvas as a physical object rather than a work of art the situation changes. A little scurrying around with a micrometer, a color chart, and a few other standard measuring devices, and we can satisfy ourselves that our environment, even when made into a work of art, is the same for all. The Van Gogh landscape is what it is, a thing-in-itself. No offense intended against artistic interpretation, of course, but if we would know things as they are we must cancel the personal equation and rely upon objective description.

And we believe that we can do this! We believe, further, that in doing so we arrive at a fundamental understanding of our environment. To return to my glasses, it is obvious that there is a normal situation, the one which the oculist intended I should experience when he prescribed for me. I had only to get the bridge straight. But note this word, normal. It is slippery. I should like to point out that in this belief in the objectivity of Nature and in the reality of a ‘normal situation’ we are thoroughly mistaken and childishly naïve. In no part of contemporary life are we as dogmatic, as sure of ourselves, as we are in describing Nature.

This Nature which we literally worship is in reality a product of ourselves, an interpretation no less than that of the landscape. It is no more real than God or the soul, though certainly no less, and our conception of it is surprisingly elementary and limited. Pin down Nature and it slips away. Describe it and it becomes empty. We are like a man who might try to reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle from one piece. It cannot be done. The limitations of our knowledge of Nature are equaled only by the audacity and conceit with which that knowledge is accompanied. Were it not for the usefulness of our childish concept of the objectivity and independence of Nature, we might describe it as one tremendous hoax. But useful judgments are not necessarily true ones, and our concept of Nature has done our thinking much harm. Nature is no more objective, no more solid, no more fundamental, no more the key to value, than any other of our major concepts.

In the Land of Oz, which most of us visited with great delight as children, there was an Emerald City in which the inhabitants and all visitors wore green glasses. We, the visitors, knew the trick and had the fun. We had an ocular sophistication which gave us a tremendous advantage over our hosts. To the inhabitants things looked green. We, the visitors to Oz, could count the normal situation to be the one in which no glasses were worn. But every day and outside of storybooks we all live in an Emerald City, for we all to some degree see colors differently; and unfortunately we can count on no visitors from ‘outside’ to set us right. As regards color, we all live in strictly and unavoidably private worlds. Neither my wife nor I have any way of knowing whether or not the other has the same sense impression when looking at my neckties. When she sees red she may get the sense impression I get when I see green. I often point this out.

There are innumerable comforting examples of the private world of sensation. The principle is always the same. In many, the problem of finding a norm which shall be useful as such, though still arbitrary, is easy; in some it is difficult. In the instances of taste and smell it is almost impossible. There are two reasons for this. One is that tastes, and smells, cannot be distinguished from one another as clearly as colors. They blur. The other is that they are more fundamentally dependent upon the momentary condition of the sense organs involved. There is a good reason why epicures seldom smoke, and why appetizers are not sweet.

You will dismiss, perhaps, the perplexity involved in the case of the crooked glasses by saying that I have only to measure my height against the wall to know the tallness of the real me. If two of my friends were to measure my height independently they would agree. And, you say, one is not concerned about the privateness of color sensation, because I know that when my wife objects to the tie I have chosen we are both talking about the same tie and the same color. If my wife thinks the ‘orange linen tie’ would go better with my ‘blue’ shirt, I will get the tie she refers to when I go upstairs. By twisting my glasses I do not make myself tall or short. By putting on sun glasses I do not change the color of my ties. Things are what they are. An object has height relative to a platinum rod in a bureau of standards; it has color relative to the sun’s spectrum; it gives tone relative to a steel wire of a stated diameter, stopped at a certain length, and weighted by a standard weight; it has taste relative to the time of day, the amount of candy I have eaten, and so forth. Things are what they are. But what are they?

We know the objects of Nature relative always and exclusively to arbitrary standards which human intelligence has chosen. Just how arbitrary these ‘standards’ are, and therefore how arbitrary our knowledge is, is really surprising. Consider color again. When my wife buys material for a belt she matches it to a dress. She is careful to match the articles under sunlight, or under a ‘daylite’ lamp. Why? The only reason, fundamentally, is that we happen to be creatures who live most of our waking hours in sunlight. Suppose we rose at sunset, worked at night, played at night, and slept during the day. Our habits are quite accidental, and may change considerably when civilization really ‘gets going.’ If we had descended from owls our color judgments would be different. Our standard might be given by a dim owlish lamp which met certain manufacturing requirements. In matching colors we might shun daylight as assiduously as we now shun the ordinary Mazda bulb.

Suppose our atmosphere, like hotel lobbies, was continuously suffused with cigarette smoke: our smell description of our environment would be thoroughly altered. Suppose we possessed the multiple optical lens of the housefly. There are many possibilities, each suggested by only a minor change in our biological make-up, and each suggesting the unreliability of our description of the environment.

Or, to take another tangent, suppose our sense organs to be what we now speak of as normal, but either enlarged uniformly many thousand times or made smaller to the same degree. Suppose we were creatures as large as the earth or as small as amœbæ. In the latter case our description of the polished surface of a table would include ‘mountainous’ rather than ‘polished.’ If we were as small as electrons the table would dissolve and we should see a space as empty and as discontinuous as the one we now gaze upon on a starry evening. This is imaginative, but it has an importance difficult to exaggerate. The contributions of the various natural sciences will surely be set down by the historian of the future as both the most typical and the most valuable of the era of which we are a part. And our study of the environment is reaching a truly significant stage. With the pouring of the 200-inch mirror at Corning, New York, a year or so ago, we reached what may be a limit in the building of telescopes. With the perfection of the ultramicroscope we are approaching a similar limit in the other direction.

We are surprised, somewhat naïvely, to discover that, from the point of view of size, Man is near the middle of our universe. It would have been more surprising had we discovered anything else. The limitations are those of human beings and their instruments. The world of Nature which we know is the world of Nature which organisms of our size and accomplishments can know. It is not the world of Nature; it is our world of Nature, just as much as the Van Gogh landscape is your landscape or mine. We have far more of the responsibility for Nature than we think when we glibly speak of it as being independent of us. If we were creatures twenty thousand miles tall, what we now know as biology would be a closed book. If we were as small as amœbæ, astronomy would be unknown.

II

One of the most interesting of the problems of biology is that of why unit cells and unit organisms act for the welfare of the whole of which they are parts. If we fracture a bone, a piece of muscle tissue will become transformed into bone tissue. Whenever infection enters the blood system the white corpuscles ‘mobilize’ to ‘combat’ it. Some biologists claim that there is a vital principle, or entelechy, which is responsible. If there is, we are no nearer to understanding it than Aristotle, who first suggested it, was. Others, while denying a vital principle, seem quite unable to avoid vitalistic words and phrases in their descriptions. The phenomenon is so pronounced that Alexis Carrel has suggested that the organic unit has consciousness or mind. The problem is highly important to human philosophy, but probably unanswerable by human research. This would, perhaps, not be the case if we were as small as amœbæ and could examine the phenomenon ‘on the spot.’

One biologist has compared the situation to one that might arise if a giant several hundred miles tall were to study through his gigantic ‘ microscope ’ one of our automobile factories. He would find precisely the same need for a principle governing the actions of human beings who were workers, foremen, or managers. We understand the organization, but would he? The human mind, to the giant, would be so minute that it would not suggest even the beginnings of what we know about our mental life. The parallel is clear. One taste of a really potent Wonderland mushroom and there might open up for us perspectives in biology of which we can now only dream. And what might we not learn if we could reach out and manipulate spiral nebulæ as easily as we may now spin children’s tops?

Consider another set of possibilities. A friend of mine has a dog whistle which boasts the social advantage of being practically inaudible to the human ear. Suppose us to be the size we are and with our present sense organs, but suppose we extend the ranges of those organs. Suppose our hearing began at the middle of the piano keyboard and extended to ‘sounds’ which are at present unheard. We would not hear footsteps or even thunder. We would hear things that now occur unheeded — as, for example, the songs of certain insects.

Or, to choose a more startling possibility, suppose our eyes were sensitive to infra-red rays. In that case a stove or a flatiron would give ample ‘light.’ Artificial light would be cheaper and easier to produce. There would be no clouds to admire, but London would be freed of pea-soup fogs and travel by sea would be less hazardous. We all know of the blind man’s sensitiveness of touch and hearing. If we inhabited Wells’s Country of the Blind we could get along very well, as he points out, but certainly our understanding of Nature would be radically different.

Suppose we could develop a sensitiveness to temperature that would allow us, like some machines, to detect the lighting of a candle at a distance of a mile. No creeping up on a person in the dark in that case! Eliminate our sense organs singly or in pairs, and multiply the powers of those that remain. You get fascinating possibilities. All would alter Nature. Our ‘standard equipment,’ like that of an automobile, is quite accidental.

Two years ago there appeared a news item which had all of the ingredients of a first-class nightmare. A man in the West, it was reported, woke up one morning to find himself a human radio receiver. Some might think him fortunate to be able to tap the ether without paying even a penny. But the story in its full horror is not yet told. The man was a human radio, but he could not switch himself off! There are a few conspicuous individuals in any community who would not shudder at this detail. We can, on most occasions, escape. But this poor Westerner heard rising exercises, breakfast hour, cooking recipes, market reports, Buck Rogers — everything right through to the last swing of the last dance orchestra in the early morning.

I shall not ask you to dwell on this man’s misfortune; and I shall not ask you to take the newspaper story very seriously. But I do wish that an old Greek thinker named Protagoras might hear the story, for it throws an extraordinary light on his pet idea that Man is the measure of all things. We have laughed at him ever since Plato gave him what is generally considered to be a knockout blow. But our modern world suggests possibilities of which neither Protagoras nor Plato could have dreamed, and Protagoras could defend himself much more convincingly to-day.

We might have been born radio receivers rather than auditory ones. In the interests of intercommunication one would have to imagine us at the same time equipped to transmit radio frequencies. It might have worked out that way. The chief differences between sound waves and radio waves are the tuning qualities and the distance spanned. If we were all radio stations we could have much more privacy — and less. I cannot now in company tell my wife that her slip is showing without causing her embarrassment. I could on a radio wave different from that of the drawingroom conversation, but anyone for miles around who wanted to tune in would be rewarded by hearing that important fact. And distance would be far less an obstacle to communication. The most powerful sound amplifiers we have can be heard only a few miles. If we were radios we could without exerting ourselves have all of the advantages of telephones without the cost. Travel would be less necessary, and less of a separation. Our bonds with our fellow men would be closer.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this possibility is that it is more than that already. Mental telepathy is an accredited fact; its actuality can easily be shown by a simple demonstration that I have often made for friends. Yet is mental telepathy more than what we have just been describing? Its chief difference is its limitations, or primitiveness. We might have been born with highly developed telepathic powers and primitive oral ones. The reason why we were not is easy to find. The ability to hear sounds was far more important to survival during the evolutionary struggle than this other. There were not many ‘thoughts’ then anyway.

It is interesting to speculate on the influence which evolution alone has had upon our knowledge. We know Nature as we do because we met evolutionary crises in certain ways. There is another notable point. Species are altered as environments change. Our civilized environment is already having its effect upon us. It has been suggested that in our new environment some mode of communication such as mental telepathy will be more essential to survival than audition. Give us another ten thousand years and our modes of communication with others and with our environment may be so different that our concepts of Nature will be completely altered. They have already altered since the simian stage. Our senses of smell, taste, and hearing are atrophying. What new senses will take their places?

The science laboratories have introduced possibilities which would have amazed the Greeks. Suppose we were sensitive to X-rays. This is another power that would not have been particularly useful to the ape-man. A lion’s skin was a more eloquent danger signal than his skeleton would have been. To be able to avoid the bones in raw fish would have constituted a luxury, not a necessity. And it would have done the savage little good to be able to see into the stomach of a sick companion. But to-day X-ray keeps many of us alive. If we were equipped to see X-rays we could not only enjoy the convenience of not having to rummage in pockets or handbag for the front-door key, but there would be major advantages such as a simplified crime problem. The robber’s gun could no longer be hidden. The thief might be detected immediately.

But why limit ourselves to X-rays? There are alpha rays and beta rays and ultra-violet rays and cosmic rays. A hundred years ago they all beat against us, figuratively speaking, and we were unaware of them. How many new ones will be discovered in the next hundred years? How many in the next thousand? The only safe conclusion is that our comprehension of Nature is decidedly limited both by the size of our sense organs and by the range of their sensitivity. The extent and importance of these limitations we shall never know. To doubt them would constitute a naïveté and conceit parallel to that of the old churchmen who placed the earth at the centre of the universe or the early evolutionists who placed Man at the top of the evolutionary ladder.

III

Let us return to our original proposition. Are the objects in our environment independent? Can you describe them as such? Have they a certain color? We have found that they have not. We call grass green only by convention and habit endowment. Smell, taste, touch, sound — all the same. The relativity of sensation is made clear by the well-accepted proposition that the process of sensation involves not only the object, but also the medium and the sense organ. Instead of saying that grass is green, we should say that the source of light is such, our eyes are such, and grass is such, that we have the sensation of greenness. The objects of nature are something-we-know-notwhat. But we still affirm that they are something and that that something is independent of us.

We take refuge in a faith in the primary qualities of Nature — extension, mass, velocity. But this refuge, too, lacks security. We say that even if we cannot be certain of the color and smell of this apple we know that it has a certain shape and weight and state of motion or rest. But Einstein has swept away this last resort for confidence. His doctrine of relativity has upset our most conventional beliefs by asserting that even shape and mass and velocity are relative to the observer. In this automobile age the case of velocity is clear to all, for in passing the car ahead we must consider our velocity relative to it and not to the ground. The relativity of motion is based on the realization that nowhere in the universe is there an absolute centre from which motion can be measured. A body has velocity relative to another body; and it will have different velocities simultaneously relative to two bodies which are in motion relative to each other. But this is not all. Extend the principle, as Einstein does, to shape and mass. If your familiar and seemingly constant yardstick in the corner were to whiz by you at half the speed of light, it would be only eighteen inches long with reference to another held in your hands. And it would have lost half its weight. We cannot, then, be sure of even the primary qualities of our environment.

The final fortress of our customary concept of Nature has been stormed and captured. We are not entirely averse to being persuaded that such sensations as color are relative to the observer, but that shape and mass should also be demands a thorough revision of what is generally spoken of as common sense. We are like a small boy watching a show from the second balcony. Even he soon becomes sophisticated. He sees the spotlight move and change color and realizes that things are not as they seem, that he is seeing what the producer wants him to see. Unfortunately there is no electrician to help us by slipping a blue gelatine screen over the sun, and the fields examined in our microscopes and telescopes represent only a small portion of our stage.

When he grows up, the boy learns that the heroine is not as beautiful as she seems to be, and unless he is incurably romantic he no longer falls in love with her. But we are still in love with Nature, and still believe in the central importance of the few details which we are privileged to have brought distortedly to our perception. We still believe that things are what they seem, that the electron and the spiral nebula represent approximately the limits of our universe. We forget that we are seeing through human eyes, and can see through no others. We forget that each atom may be a universe as complex as our own, and that our universe may be but an atom in another so gigantic that our imagination staggers in picturing it.

Nature is the product of ourselves and enjoys the same reality as the products of our religious thinking and our artistic endeavors. It is no more objective than they are and no more fundamental to our philosophies. Indeed, there are whole realms of human understanding to which it offers not even a clue. It is an interpretation, a system of ideas, developed for a definite purpose, and should be kept within the bounds of its usefulness.

(To be concluded)