2.1 THE INSIDE OF THINGS

Humans have always been curious about what lies inside the things they encounter in experience. But what is this inside which man seeks and how does it differ from the outside? To answer that question, let us break a thing, say a piece of chalk, in two to see what lies inside it. What we get are two pieces of chalk which are outside each other, but no inside. Perhaps we did not go far enough to reach the inside. We therefore go on and break each existing half into two and get four identical pieces of chalk, each outside all the others. Again, no inside is seen. Clearly, if we continued this process long enough, the original chalk would become a quantity of powder consisting of a large number of small pieces of chalk lying outside each other. It seems that at the very moment when we thought we had grasped the interior of the piece of chalk, it has enclosed itself again inside the resulting pieces and we are unable to find it. The result of all this is that the interior of things is always again an exterior.

The corpuscular conception of matter embodies this simple and all pervasive human experience. It conceives the inside of things to be a collection of smaller constituent things, each of which is of the same kind with the thing they constitute. There has rarely been any serious doubt before the crisis of 1900 that the constituents were as real as the constituted. Had we been able to directly encounter these extremely small things, they would undoubtedly have looked to us as the things we encounter in our daily experience. This conception had the virtue of replacing the elusive inside with an easily conceivable structure of familiar things extending external relationships to each other, relationships which Newtonian mechanics was expressly designed to capture. In time, the conception’s manifest ability to qualitatively account for experience was thus enlarged by a corresponding quantitative accounting which eventually encompassed thermodynamics, chemistry, and electricity.