B1214 <=> B1216 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1215]

If one has the requisite power and could compel a group of contemporary people, even from among these who have received so to say “a good education,” to state exactly how they each understand the word “world,” they would all so “beat about the bush” that involuntarily one would recall even castor oil with a certain tenderness. For instance, one of them who among other things had read up a few books on astronomy, would say that, the “world” is an enormous number of suns surrounded by planets situated at colossal distances from each other and together forming what we call the “Milky Way”; beyond which, at immeasurable distances and beyond the limits of spaces accessible to our investigation, are presumably other constellations and other worlds.

Another, interested in contemporary physics, would speak of the world as a systematic evolution of matter, beginning with the atom and winding up with the very largest aggregates such as planets and suns; perhaps he would refer to the theory of the similitude of the world of atoms and electrons and the world of suns and planets, and so on in the same strain.

One who, for some reason or other, had made a hobby of philosophy and read all the mishmash on that subject, would say that the world is only the product of our subjective picturings and imaginings, and that our Earth, for example, with its mountains and seas, its vegetable and animal kingdoms, is a world of appearances, an illusory world.

A man acquainted with the latest theories of poly-dimensional space would say that the world is usually looked upon as an infinite three-dimensional sphere, but that in reality a three-dimensional world as such cannot exist and is only an imagined cross section of another four-dimensional world out of which comes and into which goes everything proceeding around us.