William James on the illusion of order - or disorder - in the world.
When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the
other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely
human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful,
æsthetic, or moral,—so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact
emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents
of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from
our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by
choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of
any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I
could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in
almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then
say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other
beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature
are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious
lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the
special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither
named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things 'unadapted' to
each other in this world than there are things 'adapted'; infinitely more things
with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look
for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve
it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of
them fills our encyclopædias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an
infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of
relations that never yet attracted our attention. (Varieties, 438n)
Is our cherry-picking too unambitious? Noticing the unremarked "relations" among the "infinite chaos of objects" might be part of making them into adaptations. I love the bean game. Maybe Bruno Munari can help us take it farther! Courtyard maples in red/green/yellow approve!
