Perception, Work In Progress, A Beautiful Sunset
"…likewise, if I close one eye, I see my hand smaller than with both eyes. If I had three eyes, I would see it larger, and the more eyes I had, the larger everything around me would seem. Nevertheless, born with thousands of eyes among colossal creatures, all keeping their proportions in relation to myself, they would seem to me neither larger nor smaller than today. Let us imagine the world shrunk to a bullet size, and everything in it analogously reduced; the inhabitants of this world, endowed with our sense organs, would perceive everything the same way and with the same proportions we do. Let us imagine it, caeteris paribus, a thousand times larger—still the same thing: with unchanged proportions, a world a thousandfold larger and a thousandfold smaller would be the same to us. So when I look at objects with one eye I see them smaller; with two, larger; how large are they in the absolute? Who knows if we are not actually living in a microscopic world and only the nature of o...
