Olga required Perry to do considerable writing, which he referred to facetiously as his ‘homework’ or his ‘examinations’. There was an entire series in which he was asked to define terms. In the earlier papers the words to be defined were comparatively simple, such as ‘walking’, ‘road’, ‘apple’, ‘cat’. Perry started in on these blithely determined to show that he positively was not chasing butterflies. But these papers came back to him with discrepancies and confusing terms pointed out and with a request for more nearly unmistakable definitions. He grew hot and sweaty and struggled with attempts to say in words just exactly what he meant. Then his second attempts came back with a congratulatory note on the care with which he had made his definitions, but with a comment on his definition of ‘horse’: ‘Does this definition include clothes’ horse, saw horse, horse play, horse dice? Please examine your other definitions with this comment in mind.’ Grimly he sat down to modify the definitions which he had believed to be so beautifully exact. He hit upon the following dodge, a phrase which he added to each definition:’—and many other meanings, determined by the context, the speaker and listener, and the idiom of the period.’ Finally he stated the proposition that a word is adequately defined when it is used in such a fashion that it means the same thing to the listener as it means to the speaker. He sent this in with the hope that it would settle the matter. He was soon undeceived for he was requested the next day to define ‘human nature’, ‘patriotism’, ‘justice’, ‘love’, ‘honor’, ‘duty’, ‘space’, ‘matter’, ‘religion’, ‘god’, ‘life’, ‘time’, ‘society’, ‘right’, and ‘wrong’. After three days of fruitless struggle in an attempt to do something with these words, he sent back the following statement: ‘Insofar as I am able to tell these words have no meaning whatsoever, for I am unable to devise any means of defining them so that they mean the same to the speaker as to the listener.’ The answer that came back was cryptic: ‘Let the problem lie, but do not abandon it. Could you design a turbine without a knowledge of calculus and of entropy?’ He was then requested to formulate a mechanics of a pseudo-gravitation based on a law of attraction by inverse cubes instead of inverse squares. He became fascinated with the beautiful logical consequences of this problem and produced a monograph on the resulting ballistics. He was then asked if he could design sights for a gun to be fired under the postulated conditions. This request struck him as ridiculous and he demanded an explanation of Olga.
“Olga, what is all this rigamarole? What possible use is it for me to design a worthless gun?”
Olga smiled a long slow smile. “I would like to tell you the meaning but I can’t. If you knew the meaning the rigamarole would not be necessary. But you must discover meaning for yourself. We are trying to help you discover the meaning of the words you didn’t define.”
“I’d like to lay hands on the guy who thought up this last little joke.” She took his hand and placed it on her shoulder. “You did? Olga, I thought you were a pal of mine.”
“I am, Perry, but it’s part of my business to see that your treatment is approached through fields you understand and to watch its effect on you. However I think we can skip a step at this point. You obviously don’t want to bother with designing this gun sight. But you could design it, could you not?”
“Certainly. Nothing to it. You see—” Perry launched into a flow of the technicalities used in ordnance and ballistics, and described with sweeps of his hands what would happen to a shell unlucky enough to be constrained by an inversed-cube type acceleration. “—and all this is in vacuo, of course. I wouldn’t attempt to predict without empirical data the effect of a gaseous medium constrained by the same field.”
“That’s enough, Perry. I didn’t understand a third of what you said, but I’m convinced that you could design the gunsight. Suppose we had such a gun and set it up here. Could you hit that sailboat over there across the lake?”
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