Two New Worlds; I. the Infra-World II. the Supra-World (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV INFRA-WORLD MECHANICS AND PHYSICS 1. The physical aspect of the universe is governed by four quantities, four " elements " of a much more fundamental character than earth, air, fire, and water. These four quantities are length, time, mass, and electricity. None of these can be completely expressed by any combination of the other three. The conceptions of extension, space, length, area, volume are abstractions of our own mind, which express and embody the fundamental fact of plurality or coexistence. There would be no need for " space " if I were the only sentient being, and had only one sensation at a time. I should then be quite incapable of arriving at the conception of space. There would be nothing to suggest it. But the simultaneous existence of beings and objects which are independent of my will leads me to form in- stinQtively the idea of space. As space implies coexistence, so time implies change. The measurement of time implies two simultaneous changes, one of which occurs at regular intervals?i.e., intervals which are accom- panied by the same quantity of change in many other objects. It is well known in psychology that the eye and the touch are both at work to give the infant the sense of space. The notion of time is acquired through the eye, the ear, and the touch. The notion of mass is more complex. It is primarily based upon the muscular sense. It involves a notion of volume and a notion of density or intensity. The observation that mere bulk does not determine the relative importance of moving objects, that two objects filling the same amount of space, and moving with the same speed, may have very different effects upon the motion of other bodies, leads to the abstraction of density, and indirectly to the idea of mass. But the idea of ...