Science and the Infinite by Sydney T. Klein (english books to improve english txt) 📖

investigation, we are forced to recognise that the only way we can approach conception of the Infinite is necessarily in the form of a negative, the negative applying to those things of which we have cognisance; we carry our thought to the utmost limit possible with our present knowledge, and, when we have come to a standstill, we conceive the Infinite to be not that but something further on. As our knowledge increases by small steps, that something further on seems ever to be flying from our grasp by mighty strides, until we are forced to bow our heads and recognise that we are in the presence of, though still not in sight of, the Reality. A divine impulse is ever urging us forward to greater conceptions but shattering our hopes, and giving us a feeling akin to despair, if we arrogate to ourselves a greater power of conception than we have knowledge to sustain; we have to approach the study with, indeed, that feeling of elation which the consciousness of our origin and destiny wakes within us, giving us a feeling of certainty that we are capable, in the hereafter, of attaining to the highest summit of knowledge, but with that humility, in the present, which makes us acknowledge that he who knows most knows most how little he knows. In this frame of mind let us now examine our surroundings.

We are living in a world of continuous and multitudinous changes; in fact, without change, we could have no cognisance of our surroundings, we should have no consciousness of living. We have become so accustomed to certain sensations that we are apt to take them, as facts, and scoff at the suggestion that they are non-realities. I propose, however, to show that what we perceive are not Realities, and true conception of our surroundings depends upon the knowledge which we can bring to bear to interpret the meaning of these sensations. It is only in response to our conscientious endeavours to form new concepts that knowledge is being daily revealed to us; the more we progress in Knowledge the more we see that Perception alone without Knowledge leads to false concepts, and these in their turn create fatal obstacles and difficulties to our progress towards the true appreciation of the Universe. Let me give a few examples.

In early times the Sun and the Stars were seen to revolve round the Earth once every day, and, without Knowledge of Astronomy, this was taken for granted as an absolute fact, and was looked upon as a reality; later on, however, it was noted that the Stars never changed their relative positions; this necessitated a new concept, namely, that they were fixed on the inner surface of a huge globe, which was also revolving. This false concept brought other difficulties into play, the question arose as to what was beyond the globe, and also the difficulty that, when the Stars as well as the Sun were found to be at such enormous distances from the Earth, their rates of motion were quite inconceivable. Even in the case of the Sun the motion represents over twenty-five million miles per hour, and the apparent motion of the Stars is thousands of times faster than Light travels. These insuperable difficulties were not swept away until, by the advance of Knowledge, the falsity of Conception, based only upon appearance, was made manifest, and it was seen that it was the Earth which revolved and not the Stars. Even then, owing to its supposed antagonism to what was stated in the Bible, the new Conception was opposed with great bitterness, it being long looked upon and denounced as a sacrilegious invention, and anybody daring to promulgate such a doctrine was threatened with death.

Our present Conception, that the Earth turns round on its axis once every day, and rolls in its orbit round the Sun once in every year, may be called a Reality to our finite Senses; but I shall show later on that, except for the finiteness of our senses and the imperfection of our Knowledge, the Concept is not a true one. With perfect Perception and perfect Knowledge we shall see that, apart from the two limitations or modes under which our physical senses act, there can be no such thing as Motion, because the very essence of Motion is but the product of those limitations, namely, Time and Space.

We are so accustomed to take everything for granted, that it may perhaps seem strange to question whether it can even be asserted that we have ever seen matter. Let us turn towards a common object in this room. We catch in our eyes the multitudinous impulses which are reflected from its surface under circumstances somewhat similar to those in which a cricketer "fields" a ball; he puts his hand in the way of the moving ball and catches it, and, knowing the distance of the batsman, he perhaps recognises, by the hard impact of the ball, that the batsman has strong muscles, but he cannot be said to see the batsman by that impact, nor can he gain thereby any idea as to his character. So it is with objective intuition; we direct our eyes towards an object, and catch thereby rays of light reflected from that object at different angles, and, by combining all these directions, we recognise form, and come to the conclusion that we are looking at, say, a chair. The eye also tells us that rays are coming in greater quantity from some parts of it, and we know that those parts are polished; the eye again catches rays giving higher or lower frequencies of vibration, and we call that colour; our eyes also tell us that it intercepts certain rays reflected from other objects in the room, and we know that it is not transparent to light; and those are our sight perceptions of a wooden chair.

We may go a little further by "pushing," when we know, by the amount of resistance compared with the power exerted, what force of gravity is being exerted by and on that chair, and we declare it heavy or light, but by these means we get no nearer to the knowledge of what matter is. By tests and reagents we can resolve wood into other forms which we call Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, &c., which, because we cannot divide them into any other known substances, we call "Elements," but we can only look at these in the same way as we are looking at the chair. Chemists, however, carry us a little further, and show us that the Elementary substances have not only their likes and dislikes, but their passionate desires and lukewarmness to others of their ilk, and, when opportunity offers, they break up with great violence any ordinary friendship existing between them and their neighbours, and seize on their coveted prey with a strength of will surpassing anything experienced in the Organic World; and this new association they maintain, until they, in their turn, are dispossessed, or they encounter another substance of still greater attraction, when they leave their first love and take up new connections.

I shall touch upon the subject of what matter is later on; meanwhile let us consider how, owing to our senses being limited by the considerations of Time and Space, we are surrounded by inconceivables, and yet it is those very inadequate conceptions which force us to acquire Knowledge; the greatest incentive we have to pursue our investigation is, as we have seen, the fact that Perception without sufficient Knowledge leads us into difficulties. Let me give you two instances of these inconceivables. Infinite Space is inconceivable by us, but it is also quite as inconceivable, or perhaps even more so, to think of Space being limited, and yet we are forced to declare that one of these two must be true. Again, Matter is either composed of ultimate bodies, of a certain size which cannot be divided, or is infinitely divisible; both of these are inconceivable, the latter for the same reason as that of the Infinity of Space, and the former because it is inconceivable that the ultimate body could not be divided into two parts by a sharp edge forced between its two sides, or by a stronger force than at present holds it together; it has indeed been suggested as an explanation that, if an atom could be divided, it might cease to be matter, that its parts would have no existence, but it is difficult to conceive how two nothings can form one something.

Another example of Perception leading to a false Concept is our Sense of Pain; we apply a red-hot coal to the tip of one of our fingers and our Perception would have us believe that we feel intense pain at the point of contact, but we know this to be a false Concept, as it can be shown that the pain is only felt at the brain: there are in communication with different parts of our body small microscopical nerve threads, any of which may be severed with a pen-knife close to the base of the skull, with the result that no pain can then be felt, although the fingertip is just as much alive and is seen to be burning away.

Another example is our Sense of Hearing. A musical sound is made up of a certain number of pushes in a second, but each push is silent. It is only, as we have seen, a musical sound to our Sense when the pushes recur at intervals of not more than the sixteenth part of a second. The prongs of a tuning-fork, vibrating 500 times per second, seem to be travelling very quickly, but are really only moving at the rate of 10 inches per second, or not much over half a mile per hour, when the amplitude is the hundredth part of an inch, which gives quite a loud sound.

Light is also composed of rills in the Ether, but the rill itself is not Light, it is only Light when these rills strike, with a certain enormous frequency, on a special organ adapted for, we might say, counting these frequencies, and if these frequencies fall below that certain number, or above twice that number per second, there is no Sense of Sight.

How few people have ever realised what a wonderful Counting Machine they possess in their organ of Sight! I think the best method I can adopt, to bring this clearly before you, is to take our tuning-fork, vibrating 500 times per second, a rapidity which to some will be even difficult to comprehend, and then ask you to consider how long that fork must continue to vibrate before it has accomplished the full number of frequencies, which must necessarily impinge upon the eye in one second of time, before the phenomenon of sight becomes possible. That tuning-fork would have not only to continue its vibrations without diminution for seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, or hundreds of years, but for 30,000 years before it has accomplished the full number of pulsations which, as Ether waves, must strike the eye in one second of time, to give the impression of Light; the calculation is easy, the rills of Red Light are so small that 40,000 of these only cover one inch of length, and light travels 186,000 miles per second. If therefore the number of inches in 186,000 miles are multiplied by the 40,000, and the product is divided by the 500 times which the tuning-fork vibrates in one second, you have the number of seconds that tuning-fork must vibrate, before it has completed the number of impacts which, in one second of time, must fall on our retina to give us