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He began by saying
that everybody thought of Space as an empty homogeneous medium.
“Never mind at present what the ultimate
constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished
product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at
all. That is the view of civilized man. You will find all the
philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not
take that view. An animal, for instance. It feels a kind of quality
in Space. It can find its way over new country, because it perceives
certain landmarks, not necessarily material, but perceptible, or if you like
intelligible. Take an Australian savage. He has the same power, and
I believe, for the same reason. He is conscious of intelligible
landmarks.”
“You mean what people call a sense of
direction,” I put in.
“Yes, but what in Heaven’s name is a sense of
direction? The phrase explains nothing. However incoherent the mind
of the animal or the savage may be, it is there somewhere, working on some
data. I’ve been all through the psychological and anthropological side of
the business, and after you eliminate clues from sight and hearing and smell
and half-conscious memory there remains a solid lump of the inexplicable.”
From: John Buchan, "Space"
(1912)
Dr.
Feelgood: Don't You Just Know It (1976) (Link)
I
had arrived that afternoon from the south, while he had been taking an off-day
from a week’s stalking, so we had walked up the glen together after tea to get
news of the forest. A rifle was out on the Correi na Sidhe beat, and a
thin spire of smoke had risen from the top of Sgurr Dearg to show that a stag
had been killed at the burn-head. The lumpish hill pony with its
deer-saddle had gone up the Correi in a gillie’s charge, while we followed at
leisure, picking our way among the loose granite rock and the patches of wet
bogland. The track climbed high on one of the ridges of Sgurr Dearg, till it
hung over a cauldron of green glen with the Alt-na-Sidhe churning in its linn a
thousand feet below. It was a breathless evening, I remember, with a
pale-blue sky just clearing from the haze of the day. West-wind weather
may make the North, even in September, no bad imitation of the Tropics, and I
sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hours had been trolling on the
screes of Sgurr Dearg. By and by we sat down on a bank of heather,
and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet. The clatter of the
pony’s hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had gone, event the midges seem to
have forgotten their calling. No place on earth can be so deathly still
as a deer-forest early in the season before the stags have begun roaring, for
there are no sheep with their homely noises, and only the rare croak of a raven
breaks the silence. The hillside was far from sheer – one could
have walked down with little care – but something in the shape of the hollow
and the remote gleam of white water gave it an air of extraordinary depth and space.
There was a shimmer left from the day’s heat, which invested bracken and rock
and scree with a curious airy unreality. One could almost have believed
that the eye had tricked the mind, that all was mirage, that five yards from
the path the solid earth fell away into nothingness.
