The Nature of Knowledge

Man is characterized more by the nature of his knowledge than by any other single factor.

Our way of knowing doesn’t surprise us at the outset, since, after all, we are right in the middle of it, and are conscious only in and through it.

There are no known limits to the capacities of man to comprehend. Man continues to learn and to push back the horizons of ignorance. Our primary knowledge is perception of sensory images. Other knowledges derive from this. Our ancestors began by seeing the clouds and the dirt and their fellow humans. Man had from the beginning two questions to ask: first, what is it? and second, is it real?

Knowledge of reality impelled man from early times to see causality in the world around him. He saw events unfold. He knew his own agency. He intuited a larger agency behind the scenes, and believed in gods, the God, or God. He did not initially have the mental mechanics or the word systems to refine his knowledge.

Sensory experience proves deceptive. Appearances confuse and ultimately prove untrustworthy. The Sun does not cross the heavens. The earth turns. Bodies are not solid. They are made up of cells, if living; of molecules, if inanimate. Stars and planets swim in an immense space.

To get to the true nature of the material world, humans needed to extend their senses beyond appearances, and to utilize instruments which would bring other realities within visible and tangible scope. We came to realize that we live in a deceptive middle world, with a near infinite macrocosm above and a microcosm below which dwindles to the infinitesimally small.

We ourselves were not grafted onto this system, but emerged from its dynamism. The ladder out of the pit of the inanimate has been the marvel of the genetic system.

We become what we know. The world inside is approaching an equivalence with the outside world to an extent which would have made Galileo gasp. What we do with this is the future history of the race.