6 - THE MYSTERY OF THE SENSUAL QUALITIES

Summary

In this last chapter I wish to demonstrate in a little more detail the very strange state of affairs already noticed in a famous fragment of Democritus of Abdera – the strange fact that on the one hand all our knowledge about the world around us, both that gained in everyday life and that revealed by the most carefully planned and painstaking laboratory experiments, rests entirely on immediate sense perception, while on the other hand this knowledge fails to reveal the relations of the sense perceptions to the outside world, so that in the picture or model we form of the outside world, guided by our scientific discoveries, all sensual qualities are absent. While the first part of this statement is, so I believe, easily granted by everybody, the second half is perhaps not so frequently realized, simply because the non-scientist has, as a rule, a great reverence for science and credits us scientists with being able, by our ‘fabulously refined methods’, to make out what, by its very nature, no human can possibly make out and never will be able to make out.

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electro-magnetic waves of wave-length in the neighbourhood of 590 millimicrons.