because its sharpness is seen under a microscope to be 
a very clumsy attempt or because atomic physics teaches 
us that what appears to us solid iron is actually 
infinitesimal universes of whirling electrons in void 
space; the difference between a piece of iron, a piece of 
wood and a drop of water is none the less real because 
all can be analysed to such infinitesimal universes. The 
general. working world of experience is not to be con- 
sidered an illusion because the senses are imperfect and 
occasionally err even at the first level of knowledge, 
any more than because a flight of ducks can be deceived 
by a floating painted wooden model of a duck, or 
because a herd of game can be approached by a hunter 
decked with foliage. It is no more an illusion that a 
color appears to us as blue just because we now know 
the reality to be light of certain frequency, than it is an 
illusion when the Morse operator reads a paragraph of 
news from the dots and dashes of his instrument. Space, 
with its three dimensions of length, breadth and thickness, 
is none the less real because we now realise that we 
cannot define absolute position but only relative; we 
may be in a moving train, on a spinning earth ‘circling 
the sun; within à moving universe, but the book we are 
reading has dimensions and a fixed position relative to 
our eyes and to all the objects in the train. Change of 
motion is no less real because it can only be determined 
in quantily and direction in relation to an arbitrary fixed 
point and. not absolutely. Time, in the world of 
actuality, is a real and distinct one-dimensioned thing; 
it can no more be regarded in practice as a fourth 
dimension of space than a clock can be used con- 
veniently and directly to measure a yard of cloth. 
| Relativity theories will, however, have to be considered 
in due course.| All these things of the world exist and 
function quite irrespective of whether I or you or any 
similar sentient being are there to perceive them; just 
as the radio waves are now all round us quite irrespective 
of whether we have a set in operation and are tuned 
in to receive signals. 
65. Our knowledge of the world of reality is now 
not a superseding of the old but an enormously impor- 
tant amplification and extension. Not only is vision 
made more penetrating by the microscope and telescope, 
and touch and muscular sense more acute by delicate 
balances, but every phenomenon is studied from so many 
different angles by means of carefully planned experi- 
ments and apparatus that.the “personal factor," so to 
speak, of our sense organs is practically eliminated. 
For example, sound and speech are recorded and studied 
on a gramophone dise or a sound track in a form quite 
independent of our ears. Photography and the cinema 
film have taken vision from the realm of metaphysics 
into the realm of actuality. The spectroscope and the 
refinements of modern chemical and electrical appliances 
are constantly approaching the nature of “things in 
reality" and eliminating the personal equation of the 
subjects psychology. ^ Electrons, which thirty years 
ago were only a speculative probability, are now 
individually manifested in the spinthariscope and the 
49 
Chapter 1—Knowledge and Things Known 
cloud chamber and made to work for us all in the 
wireless valve. 
66. In another field of knowledge the doctrine of 
organic evolution, especially the Darwinian theory of 
the origin of species by natural selection, has been of 
vital importance from its biosophic implications. In 
the first place it has rendered any such explanation as 
special creation unnecessary to account for the various 
forms of life. In the second place it has given us a 
much better alternative to the idea that the universe 
shows a benevolent design and a deliberate creation of 
conditions suitable to man, this better alternative being 
that life has itself evolved in the direction of adapting 
itself to and taking advantage of the conditions present- 
ing themselves in the environment. 
67. When it is remembered that the most important 
advances towards the knowledge of “things in reality” 
have been made within the last hundred years, an in- 
finitesimal time on the geological scale, and that advance 
is now continuing at an unprecedented rate by the 
invention of new appliances and new methods of scien- 
tific research, it would be rash indeed to set limits to the 
possibilities of further advance. The “ignorabimus” of 
one generation may well give place to knowledge or 
expectation of knowledge in the next. 
68. The prodigious growth and volume of detail 
has greatly altered the relation of the individual man 
to knowledge. To the savage of some thousands of 
years ago only a few human personalities, a few kinds 
of food animals and plants, a few simple tools, day and 
night and so on “mattered.” Outside his immediate 
environment was nothing, and, within the limitation of 
his attainable knowledge level he knew personally most 
there was for him to know. For the student of 1500 
A.D. a hundred books was a complete library. For the 
chemist of 1600 A.D. the body of chemical knowledge 
could be mastered personally in a few years. To-day 
a library may contain a million volumes, recognised 
animal species are in the neighborhood of a million, 
chemical compounds are numbered in thousands; in 
every field of knowledge even the specialist does not 
and cannot personally know more than a small corner. 
Apart from each man’s small special fraction of a sub- 
ject, knowledge now means increasingly knowing “where 
to look it up.” Herein lies one of the differences 
between using education and wasting it; all people in 
civilised countries now are more or less educated, but 
some leave school or college with the faculty of follow- 
ing up a subject which interests them or which they 
make their work, whilst others go no further than 
absorbing the knowledge that is poured into them. In 
any branch of science it is no longer possible for an 
individual to repeat and verify personally all the 
experimental work on which his science is based; as a 
student he covers as much of this as he can, and if he 
continues professionally, his practical experience covers 
more and more thoroughly a narrower field; but every- 
one now has to trust to a considerable extent at second 
