The recognition of several independent and, from a certain point of view, equivalent evolutions, developing entirely different properties, would lead us out of the labyrinth of endless contradictions in our understanding of man and would show the way to the understanding of the only real and important evolution for us, the evolution towards superman.

We have established the tremendous difference which exists between the mentality of man and that of animals. This difference is bound to have a deep effect on the animal perception of the external world. But how and in what? This is precisely what we do not know and what we must endeavour to establish.

To do this we must return once more to our perception of the world and examine in detail how we perceive it; and then we must see how the world must be perceived by the animal with its limited mental equipment.

First of all we must take note of the fact that, as regards the external aspect and form of the world, our perception is extremely incorrect. We know that the world consists of solids, but we always see and touch only surfaces. We never see or touch a solid. A solid is already a concept, made up of a number of representations put together by means of reasoning and experience. For direct sensation only surfaces exist. Sensations of weight, mass, volume, which we mentally associate with a 'solid', are in reality connected for us with sensations of surfaces. We only know that this sensation of surfaces comes from a solid, but we never sense the solid itself. Maybe it is possible to call the composite sensation of surfaces, weight, mass, density, resistance and so on - 'sensation of a solid'. But we are obliged mentally to bind all these sensations into one and to call this general sensation - a solid. We sense directly only surfaces, and then, separately, weight; we never sense the resistance of a solid, as such.

But we know that the world does not consist of surfaces, we know that we see the world incorrectly. We know that we never see the world as it really is, not only in the philosophical sense of this expression, but even in the most ordinary geometrical sense. We have never seen a cube, a sphere, etc., we have always seen only surfaces. Realizing this, we mentally correct what we see. Behind the surfaces we think the solid. But we can never represent a solid to ourselves; we cannot represent a cube or a sphere not in perspective, but from all sides at once.

It is clear that the world does not exist in perspective; yet we are unable to see it in any other way. We see everything only in perspective, i.e. in perceiving it, we distort the world with our eye. And we know that we distort it. We know that it is not as we see it. And mentally we continually correct what the eye sees, substituting the real content for those symbols of things which our sight shows US.

Our sight is a complex faculty. It consists of visual sensations, plus the memory of sensations of touch. A child tries to touch everything he sees - the nose of his nurse, the moon, the dancing spot of reflected sunlight on the wall. He learns only gradually to distinguish between the near and the far by sight alone. But we know that even in mature years we are easily subject to optical illusions.We see distant objects as flat, i.e. even more incorrectly, for relief is, after all, a symbol indicating a certain property of objects. At a great distance a man is outlined for us in silhouette. This happens because at long range we can never touch anything, and our eye has not been trained to notice the differences in surfaces which, at close range, are felt by the fingertips.

In this connection, observations made on the blind beginning to see are very interesting. The periodical Slepetz ('The Blind Man') I912, contains a description, based on direct observation, of how men, blind from birth, learn to see after an operation which has restored their sight. This is how a youth of seventeen describes his experiences after the retoration of his sight by the removal of a cataract. On the third day after the operation he was asked what he saw; he replied that he saw a vast expanse of light with dim objects moving in it. He did not distinguish these objects. Only after four days did he begin to distinguish them, and only after two weeks, when his eyes became used to the light, did he begin to make a practical use of his sight for the discernment of objects. He was shown all the colours of the spectrum and very quickly mastered them, except the yellow and the green which he kept on confusing for a long time. A cube, a sphere and a pyramid, placed before him, seemed to him a square, a fiat disc and a triangle. When a fiat disc was placed next to the sphere, he could not see any difference between them. When asked to describe his first impression of the two figures, he answered that he noticed at once the difference between the cube and the sphere and realized that they were not drawings, but could not derive from them the representation of a square and a circle, until he felt in his fingertips the same sensation as though he had touched a square and a circle. When he was allowed to handle the cube, the sphere and the pyramid, he immediately identified these solids by touch and was very surprised at not having recognized them at once by sight. He had as yet no representation of space, of perspective. All objects appeared flat to him. Although he knew that the nose projected and the eyes were sunk in cavities, the human face also looked flat to his eyes. He was overjoyed at having his sight restored, but in the beginning looking at things tired him; impressions overwhelmed and exhausted him. This is why, while enjoying perfect sight, he at times reverted to touch, as a form of relaxation.

We are never able to see even a small bit of the external world as it is, i.e. such as we know it to be. We can never see a writing desk or a cupboard simultaneously from all sides, as well as inside. Our eye distorts the external world in a certain way to enable us, in looking about, to determine the position of objects relatively to ourselves. But to look at the world not from our own point of view is impossible for us. And we are never able to have a correct view of it, a view not distorted by our eyesight.

Relief and perspective - these are the distortions of the objects by our eye. They are an optical illusion, a visual deception. A cube in perspective is only a conventional symbol of a three-dimensional cube. And everything we see is only a conventional image of that conventionally real three-dimensional world which our geometry studies - and not the real world itself. On the basis of what we see, we must guess what it really is. We know that what we see is incorrect, and we think of the world as being different from the way we see it. If we had no doubts about the correctness of our sight, if we knew that the world was such as we saw it, it stands to reason that we would think of it as we see it. In practice, however, we are constantly introducing corrections into what we see.

This capacity of introducing corrections in that which the eye sees necessarily implies the possession of concepts, for corrections are made by means of reasoning, which is impossible without concepts. Without this capacity of correcting what is seen by the eye we would see the world quite differently, i.e. much of what actually exists we would see wrongly, much of what actually exists we would not see at all, and we would see a great deal of what, in reality, does not exist at all.

In the first place, we would see an enormous number of nonexistent movements. For direct sensation, every movement of our own is connected with the movement of everything around us. We know that this movement is illusory, but we see it as real. Objects turn round before us, run past us, outstrip one another. Houses, past which we drive slowly, turn about leisurely; if we drive fast, they turn quickly; trees suddenly spring up before us, run away and vanish.

This apparent animation of objects, together with dreams, provided, and still provides, the main food for the fantasy of fairy-tales.

In those cases the 'movements' of objects may be very complex. Look at the strange behaviour of a cornfield seen through the window of your railway carriage. It runs up to your very window, stops, turns about slowly and runs to one side. The trees in the wood clearly run at different speeds, outstripping one another. A whole landscape of illusory motion! And what of the sun which still continues, in all languages, to rise and set, and the movement of which was at one time so passionately defended!

-- SAR01 (rauch01@yahoo.com), April 18, 2001