170 CREATIVE INVOLUTION 



" EAETH HEEE, REBUKED BY OLYMPUS THERE." 



All knowledge is a matter of proper placing the 

 relating of things one to another. The trained 

 thinker, said Kant, is one in whom the space-sense is 

 well developed. We have come to our present con- 

 cept of space through long learning of the laws 

 wherewith our sensations follow one another. 2 None 

 of these alone could have brought us to a three-way 

 extension of matter; for example, a purely visual 

 space is four-dimensional. Nor is the external world 

 the unmodified resultant of our bodily movements, 

 for a strictly motor space would have as many direc- 

 tions as we have muscles. 



Are we to regard geometry, then, as an experi- 

 mental science? "Nature geometrises," but so did 

 the gods before it hence no earthborn thing this, 

 the purest of all pastimes ! The experiment in the 

 case concerns not what is the truth; rather how to 

 choose from all possible truths that one which best 

 fits our human needs. What particular geometry 

 we are destined to have is a question only of our un- 

 derstanding. As to its truth as well ask if the 

 metric system is true. 



Of the infinite number of causes which give rich- 

 ness and depth to human experience, the intellect is 

 able to grasp only a small part. Some of these we 



2 See HENRI POINCARE: Science and Hypothesis, pp. 52-4. 



