Moonchild

"So it dips its point, thus. The water perceives a point. The cone goes on dipping. The water sees a circle round where the point was. The cone goes on. The circle gets bigger and bigger. Suddenly, as the cone goes completely through, snap! "Now, what does the water know? "Nothing about any cone. If it got any idea that the various commotions were caused by a single object, which it would only do if it compared them carefully, noted a regularity of rate of increase in the size of the circle, and so on — in other words, used the scientific method - it would not evolve a theory of a [60] cone, for we must remember that any solid body is to it a thing as wildly inconceivable as a fourth — dimensional body is to us. "The cone would try again. This time, we dip it obliquely. The water now perceives a totally different set of phenomena; there are no circles, but ellipses. Dip again, first at this angle, then at that. One way we get curious curves called parabolas, the other way equally curious curves called hyperbolas. "By this time the water would be nearly out of its mind, if it insisted on trying to refer all these absolutely different phenomena to a single cause! "It might work out a geometry — our own plane geometry, in fact — and it would perhaps get some extraordinary poetic conception of a Creator who manifested in his universe such marvellous and beautiful relations. It would get all sorts of fantastic theories of this Creator's power; what it would never get — until it produced a James Hinton — would be the idea that all this diversity was caused by seeing, disjointedly, different aspects of one single simple thing "I purposely took the easiest case. Suppose that instead of a cone we used an irregular body — the series of impressions would seem to the water like absolute madness! "Now slide your imagination up one dimension! Do you not see at once how parallel is our situation to that of the surface of the water? "The first impression of the savage about the universe is of a great mysterious jumble of things which come upon him without rime or reason, usually to smite him down. "Long later, man developed the idea of connecting phenomena, at least a few at a time. "Centuries elapse; he begins to perceive law, at first operating only in a very few matters. [61]