198 SIR WILLIAM OROOKES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. 



earth between fingers and thumb, moving those members, say, through 

 the space of a few inches in a second of time, we experience nothing 

 remarkable. The earth offers a little resistance, more or less, accord- 

 ing to its greater or less tenacity, but no other perceptible reaction 



follows. 



Let us suppose the same action performed by a gigantic being, able 

 to move finger and thumb in a second's space through some miles of 

 soil in the same lapse of time, and he would experience a very decided 

 reaction. The mass of sand, earth, stones, and the like, hurled together 

 in such quantities and at such speed, would become intensely hot. 

 Just as the homunculus would fail to bring about ignition when he 

 desired, so the colossus could scarcely move without causing the libera- 

 tion of a highly inconvenient degree of heat, literally making every- 

 thing too hot to hold. He would naturally ascribe to granite rocks 

 and the other constituents of the earth's surface such properties as 

 we attribute to phosphorus — of combustion on being a little roughly 

 handled. 



Need I do more than point the obvious lesson? If a possible — 

 nay, reasonable — variation in only one of the forces conditioning the 

 human race, that of gravitation, could so modify our outward form, 

 appearance, and proportions as to make us to all intents and purposes 

 a different race of beings; if mere differences of size can cause some 

 of the most simple facts in chemistry and physics to take so widely 

 different a guise; if beings microscopically small and prodigiously large 

 would simply as such be subject to the hallucinations I have pointed 

 out, and to others I might enlarge upon, is it not possible that we, 

 in turn, though occupying, as it seems to us, the golden mean, may 

 also by the mere virtue of our size and weight fall into misinterpre- 

 tations of phenomena from which we should escape were we or the 

 globe we inhabit either larger or smaller, heavier or lighter? May 

 not our boasted knowledge be simply conditioned by accidental envi- 

 ronments, and thus be liable to a large element of subjectivity hitherto 

 unsuspected and scarcely possible to eliminate ? 



Here I will introduce Professor James's speculation, to which I 

 have already alluded. It deals with a possible alteration of the time 

 scale due to a difference in rapidity of sensation on the part of a being 

 presumably on a larger scale than ourselves: 



''We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ 

 enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel, 

 and m the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Baer has 

 mdulged m some interesting computations of the effect of such differ- 

 ences m changmg the aspect of nature. Suppose we were able, within 

 the ength of a second, to note distinctly 10,000 events, instead of 

 bare y 10, as now; if our life were then destined to hold the same 

 number ot nnpressions, it might be 1.000 times as short. We should 

 live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of 



