Spencer Heath Archive

Item 309

Penned start of an article on notepad paper

Spring 1958

     Let us imagine some strange regression, some reversal in human condition to the state in which only the tactile sense is developed, the visual and the auditory yet unknown.

     The rationale of any complex thing is to be defined or understood only by analysis, by ascertaining the elements of which it is composed and their interrelations in the composite whole.

     Applying this to the human complex, let us imagine it as having reverted to that state in which none but the tactile sense was developed, hearing and sight being as yet unknown. The world of nature could then be known only in its mechanical aspects, and this only within a limited range of tactile sensi­bility and ponderable response. We may suppose then that the tactile sense would respond to no object smaller than a mouse and could report to the consciousness no object larger than an elephant. This sense would be precisely as it is today in all respects except quantitatively — in the matter of its capacity or degree. Rhythm, repetition, would be perceptible and thus quan­tities could be conceived in terms of numbers and mathematics, as the pure science of quantity based on numbers could evolve con­ceptually without limits, but its objective application could not extend beyond the bounds of quantity set by elephant and mouse.

     Within this matrix, this narrow spectrum, as it were, of objective and experiential reality magnitudes and differences could be dis­cerned but no differences at either of the limits. For on the one hand no object could present itself in any magnitude but that of a mouse or in some multiple of the mouse as a unit; and at the upper limit no magnitude greater than that of the elephant could be the subject-matter of objective experience.