I have gone out sketching and forgotten my water-dipper; among my traps I
always find something that will do, for example, the top of my tin case
(for holding pencils). This is how organs come to change their uses and
hence their forms, or at any rate partly how.
Joining and Disjoining
These are the essence of change.
One of the earliest notes I made, when I began to make notes at all, I
found not long ago in an old book, since destroyed, which I had in New
Zealand. It was to the effect that all things are either of the nature
of a piece of string or a knife. That is, they are either for bringing
and keeping things together, or for sending and keeping them apart.
Nevertheless each kind contains a little of its opposite and some, as the
railway train and the hedge, combine many examples of both. Thus the
train, on the whole, is used for bringing things together, but it is also
used for sending them apart, and its divisions into classes are alike for
separating and keeping together. The hedge is also both for joining
things (as a flock of sheep) and for disjoining (as for keeping the sheep
from getting into corn). These are the more immediate ends. The
ulterior ends, both of train and hedge, so far as we are concerned, and
so far as anything can have an end, are the bringing or helping to bring
meat or dairy produce into contact with man’s inside, or wool on to his
back, or that he may go in comfort somewhere to converse with people and
join his soul on to theirs, or please himself by getting something to
come within the range of his senses or imagination.
A piece of string is a thing that, in the main, makes for togetheriness;
whereas a knife is, in the main, a thing that makes for splitty-uppiness;
still, there is an odour of togetheriness hanging about a knife also, for
it tends to bring potatoes into a man’s stomach.
In high philosophy one should never look at a knife without considering
it also as a piece of string, nor at a piece of string without
considering it also as a knife.