CHAPTER II 

 THE OVERCOMING OF APPEARANCES 



IT was by an extraordinary mental effort that man came to 

 know anything of the world wherein he lives. It was in the 

 main a disillusionment, a struggle against and an overcoming 

 of primitive impressions that is to say, of appearances. There 

 was, there is, little enough in his surroundings, in his daily 

 life and experiences, to suggest to primitive man that the firm 

 earth he treads is like the periphery of a wheel that is whirling 

 him and all the things he looks upon his habitations and his 

 temples, the mountains and the seas round and round with 

 the velocity of a rifle bullet. No distance-posts flash by to tell 

 him, or us, that between two beats of his pulse he has been 

 shot through a space of 1500 feet, a quarter of a mile. The 

 farthest stretch of level plain or even the boundless expanse 

 of the ocean but dimly suggest, if at all, that his earth is round 

 like a melon or a pumpkin. As we journey from Liverpool 

 to New York we have no sense to make us realise that the 

 engines below are driving 30,000 tons over a mountain 350 miles 

 high, but with no more effort than as though the Atlantic were 

 as level as a floor. 



If the earth be curved like a ball, are there, then, folk like 

 us on the other side of it, straight beneath us, at the antipodes 

 as we say their feet to our feet, and hanging head downward ? 

 And if there are, what is there to hinder them from dropping 

 headlong into space ? So men reasoned once. And if this ball 

 is revolving like the fly-wheel of an engine, at an incredible speed 

 of 1000 miles an hour, 17 miles a minute, for any given point 

 near the equator, how can anything be held to its surface ; why 

 do not we and the oxen of the field, and all other things, go 

 flying off at a tangent ? How does the atmosphere stay on ; 

 why are the clouds not brushed away ? 



Again, as the thoughtful shepherds of Minor Asia, guarding 

 their flocks, looked up into the sky, what could tell them that 



