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Adventures in Philosophy |
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by John Burroughs
Life and nature and philosophy are full of contradictions. The globe upon which we live presents the first great contradiction. It has no under or upper side; it is all outside. Go around it from east to west, or from north to south, and you find no bottom or top such as you see on the globe in your study, or as you apparently see on the moon and the sun in the heavens. A fly at the South Pole of the schoolroom globe is in a reversed position, but the discoverers of the South Pole on our earth did not find themselves in a reversed position on their arrival there, or in danger of falling off. The sphere is a perpetual contradiction. It is the harmonization of opposites. Our minds are adjusted to planes and to right lines, to up and down, to over and under. Our action upon things is linear. Curves and circles baffle us. My mind cannot adjust itself to the condition of free empty space. Transport yourself in imagination away from the earth to the vacancy of the interstellar regions. Can you convince yourself that there would be no over and no under, no east and no west, no north and no south? Would one not look down to one's feet, and lift one's hand to one's head? What could one do? -- No horizontal, no vertical -- just the negation of all motion and direction. If one rode upon a meteorite rushing toward the earth, would one have the sensation of falling? Could one have any sensation of motion at all in absolutely vacant space -- no matter at what speed with reference to the stars one might be moving? To have a sense of motion must we not have also a sense of something not in motion? In your boat on the river, carried by the tide or the current, you have no sense of motion till you look shoreward. With you eye upon the water all is at rest. The balloonist floats in an absolute calm. The mind does not buffet him because he goes with it. But he looks down and sees objects beneath him, and he looks up and sees clouds or stars above him. Fancy him continuing his journey on into space till he leaves the earth behind him -- on and on till the earth appears like another moon. Would he look up or down to see it? Would he have a sense of rising or of falling? If he threw out ballast, would it drop or soar, or would it refuse to leave him? Such speculations show how relative our sense standards are, how the law of the sphere upon which we live dominates and stamps our mental concepts. Away from the earth, in free space, and we are lost; we cannot find ourselves; we are stripped of everything but ourselves; we are stripped of night and day, of up and down, of east and west, of north and south, of time and space, of motion and rest, of weight and direction. Just what our predicament would be, who can fancy?
Excerpted from Under the Apple-Trees, by John Borroughs |
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