The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE EQUINOX “Oh no, you do not!” cries the Materialist, “you certainly do exist; but not alone, for I am talking to you!” “Fool!” says the Idealist, ‘cannot you grasp the simple idea that you and your foolish argument are in fact part of me?” “But surely,” replies the Materialist, “you do not doubt that the world exists, that the Evolution of Man exists, that Judas McCabbage exists and is an actual fact.” “Granted they do exist,” sighs the Idealist, “‘so do the reflections of an ape’s face in a looking-glass, yes, they do exist, but not apart from my own mind.” “ Yet the world of a blind man,” says the Mystic, “isa very different place to the world a deaf man lives in, and both these worlds vary considerably from the world normally constituted man inhabits. Likewise animals, whose sense-organs vary from ours, live in altogether a different world from us. To give an eyeless worm eyes is only comparable to endowing us with a sixth sense. The world tous therefore depends wholly upon the development of our senses; and as they grow and decay so does the world with them, how much more then does the world of those who have outstepped the prison-house of their senses differ from the world of those who still lie bound therein. It is possible to conceive of a child being born blind (in a race of blind people) obtaining the use of its eyes when an old man, and thereupon entering a new world; why, there- fore, should it be impossible to conceive of a man with all his senses perfect obtaining another sense or entering into another dimension.* The blind man, if a few minutes after he had * “Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstration, argument, or abstract reasoning a priori.” —Hume, iv., p. 44. 298