Chapter 47

HEARING WITHOUT EARS.--”WHAT WILL BE THE END?”

A flood of recollections came over me, a vivid remembrance of my earth-learned school philosophy. “I rebel again,” I said, “I deny your statements. We can neither be moving, nor can we be out of the atmosphere. Fool that I have been not to have sooner and better used my reasoning faculties, not to have at once rejected your statements concerning the disappearance of the atmosphere.”

“I await your argument.”

“Am I not speaking? Is other argument necessary? Have I not heard your voice, and that, too, since you asserted that we had left the atmosphere?”

“Continue.”

“Have not men demonstrated, and is it not accepted beyond the shadow of a doubt, that sound is produced by vibrations of the air?”

“You speak truly; as men converse on surface earth.”

“This medium--the air--in wave vibrations, strikes upon the drum of the ear, and thus impresses the brain,” I continued.

“I agree that such is the teachings of your philosophy; go on.”

“It is unnecessary; you admit the facts, and the facts refute you; there must be an atmosphere to convey sound.”

“Can not you understand that you are not now on the surface of the earth? Will you never learn that the philosophy of your former life is not philosophy here? That earth-bound science is science only with surface-earth men? Here science is a fallacy. All that you have said is true of surface earth, but your argument is invalid where every condition is different from the conditions that prevail thereon. You use the organs of speech in addressing me as you once learned to use them, but such physical efforts are unnecessary to convey sense-impressions in this condition of rest and complacency, and you waste energy in employing them. You assert and believe that the air conveys sound; you have been taught such theories in support of a restricted philosophy; but may I ask you if a bar of iron, a stick of wood, a stream of water, indeed any substance known to you placed against the ear will not do the same, and many substances even better than the atmosphere?”

“This I admit.”

“Will you tell me how the vibration of any of these bodies impresses the seat of hearing?”

“It moves the atmosphere which strikes upon the tympanum of the ear.”

“You have not explained the phenomenon; how does that tympanic membrane communicate with the brain?”

“By vibrations, I understand,” I answered, and then I began to feel that this assertion was a simple statement, and not sufficient to explain how matter acts upon mind, whatever mind may be, and I hesitated.

“Pray do not stop,” he said; “how is it that a delicate vibrating film of animal membrane can receive and convey sound to a pulpy organic mass that is destitute of elasticity, and which consists mostly of water, for the brain is such in structure, and vibrations like those you mention, can not, by your own theory, pass through it as vibrations through a sonorous material, or even reach from the tympanum of the ear to the nearest convolution of the brain.”