ng the fool. So I was in a sense, but I was feeling
my way towards something which has been in my mind for ten years. Now
I have got it, and you must hear about it. You may take my word that
it's a pretty startling discovery.'

"I lit a pipe and told him to go ahead, warning him that I knew about
as much science as the dustman.

"I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he
meant. 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 civilised 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 the clues from sight and hearing and smell and
half-conscious memory there remains a solid lump of the inexplicable.'

"Hollond's eye had kindled, and he sat doubled up in his chair,
dominating me with a finger.

"'Here, then is a power which man is civilising himself out of. Call
it anything you like, but you must admit that it is a power. Don't you
see that it is a perception of another kind of reality that we are
leaving behind us? ', Well, you know the way nature works. The wheel
comes full circle, and what we think we have lost we regain in a higher
form. So for a long time I have been wondering whether the civilised
mind could not recreate for itself this lost gift, the gift of seeing
the quality of Space. I mean that I wondered whether the scientific
modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not
an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences,
in