TIME 67 



in the human world, then a knowledge of the measurement- 

 relations in the retina of an animal would give us a clue to the 

 place, step and moment in the world of this particular kind 

 of animal. 



THE INFLUENCE OF ABSOLUTE WORLD-MEASUREMENTS 



ON OUR EXISTENCE 



It is suggestive that, as the number of places in the world 

 increases, so also does the size of the objects surrounding us, 

 and their details correspondingly multiply. In such a case, 

 the whole world seems to expand on all sides and become 

 fuller. We get some notion of this by looking through a 

 magnifying-glass. But we must bear in mind that this 

 artificial increase in size of individual objects takes place at 

 the expense of their neighbours ; the magnification by the 

 lens depends on small sections of the field of vision being per- 

 ceived by more optical cones of the retina than in normal 

 vision. If, for instance, I project the image of a horse-chestnut 

 leaf on the visual surface of my retina, which normally would 

 hold the entire tree, the tree itself will disappear from the 

 field of view. 



But that would not happen if I could give to my retina 

 a correspondingly larger number of rods and cones. Then 

 the whole section of space represented by the chestnut leaf 

 would remain equally large in proportion to the whole optical 

 surface, but it would include now as much detail as previously 

 the whole tree did, and the tree itself would acquire a corre- 

 sponding increase in detail. 



In a world of such huge dimensions, crammed with in- 

 numerable details, quite valueless for the requirements of our 

 existence, we should feel extremely ill at ease. 



If we assume that the moments did not change, then 

 the sun, whose forward gliding is, as things are, imperceptible 



