[1]1
TARN MOOR,
HINDHEAD,
HASLEMERE.
13th January. 1913.
Dear Sir,
I cannot thank you too much for your letter of the 10th inst. I also have read most of the books to which you refer, for I felt with Lowett that it was necessary to read Metaphysics in order to get rid of them; but I have not read Mr. Bell's two volumes, and I shall now try and get hold of them.
It may interest you to know that I have received criticisms of my little paper from, amongst others, F.C. Burkitt (Regius Prof. of Divinity, Cambridge) Baron von Hügel, Bishop Ryle (Dean of Westminster) Frederic Harrison (Positivist) and George Bernard Shaw (Dramatist.), but none of them interest me more than that contained in your letter of the 10th inst.
It seems to me that my reasoning power has become crystallised into a certain mould out of which I cannot escape. What I am pleased to call "my mind" is built up on a mathematical basis. Though we cannot conceive "infinity" or "eternity", some few of us can conceive a great number, and I have in the enclosed paper tried to teach young people how to conceive it. I distinguish between "the all" and "the infinite", and as regards the physical universe, "the all" may be limited to such a number of siderial [sic] systems as would be expressed by B in the enclosed paper. I am afraid I have not2 [2] so framed "My Twins" as to make this quite clear, for I realise only too well that both "infinity" and "eternity", if such things exist, are really incomprehensible. Yet, after reading your letter, I confess I shall not have the courage to publish my paper, for I feel that there must be a defect in my own mental equipment that prevents me from sharing your views and realising the fallacy of my own reasoning. Alas! a man cannot travel outside his own mental limitations. Curiously, the most absolute agreement I have met with comes from a Senior Wrangler, and when I was a lad I should have thought it infallible, but age makes me fear that a strong mathematical bias may involve limitations similar to my own.
However this may be, I am extremely gratified to have received your kind letter.
Believe me, Dear Sir, | Most gratefully Yours, | Fred Jackson [signature]3
Dr. Alfred R. Wallace
Old Orchard,
Broadstone, Dorset
Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP3325.3293)]
For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon
[1]1
For Boys and Girls.
The difference between Big and Little, Great and Small.
You are all aware that when I write a big figure and put a small figure over it thus: 33, I mean not 3 times 3, but 3 to the power of 3. Thus I mean not 9, but 81. And in the same way 1010 means 10 with ten noughts added to it. Thus 100,000,000,000. Now imagine a sphere of which the centre of the earth is the centre, and a line from the furthest visible star to that centre is the radius. That gives you a pretty big sphere, for the furthest star that we can see with our telescope is at a distance so great that light travelling at the rate of 11,100,000 miles per minute would take several thousand years to reach us. So you see the sphere will really be pretty big.
Now take your most powerful microscope and spot with its aid the smallest microbe that is visible, and that will be a pretty small one. But we have not done yet. Now fill up the sphere until it is jammed full of the smallest microbes. Then take a slate big enough for the purpose and write down 1. Then pick out a microbe and put nought behind the 1. Next pick out another microbe and put another nought, and so on, a nought for every microbe in the sphere, until you have cleared it from all such rubbish. The figure 1. With that long tail of noughts behind it will represent a pretty big number, and that number we will call X.
Now put a small x at the top of X, thus Xx, and we shall have X to the power of X; and I think we may take now take breath. For can we imagine a larger number, or can we imagine a millionth part of such a number? We will call it B for big. [2]
Now to imagine a small number we have only to take one and put B underneath it 1/B, so that the 1 will be divided by as many times as B represents. And you may fairly take 1/B as being small, which I will call S. Of course we could go on ad infinitum, and of course, we should go mad in the process, for our brains have not the capacity to realise the infinite, (if there be such a thing) and we only use it as a convenient term. The physical universe already revealed to us is so large that we may regard it as B (big) and man’s position in that universe is so small that we may fairly regard it as S (small).
Status: Draft transcription [Enclosure (WCP3325.5727)]
For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon
Please cite as “WCP3325,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 27 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP3325