ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 209

Yet, even so, insidious though these toils of technique might thus
prove to be, the example of the social scientists suggests that the cap-
tivated historians need not have remained prisoners if a failure of nerve
had not scared them into hugging their technological chains. After
having been intimidated by an ever more sensitive 'awareness of the
possible pitfalls' in a mental landscape in which a once solid Earth was
melting into a dreamlike kaleidoscope of 'total reconstructions', these
distracted latter-day Western historians were appalled by a nightmare
in which they saw this Protean chaos solidifying again, only to confront
the tormented observer with a novel universe of an incomprehensible
complexity; and this prospect made the sheltering sands of technique
look like the only practicable refuge from the mental hell of being com-
pelled to play an eternal game of croquet with the unmanageable imple-
ments prescribed for the luckless players of the game in Lewis Carroll's
fantasy Alice through the Looking-glass.

If the latter-day Western historians' own appreciation of their plight
had been correct, this plight would have been desperate indeed; but
fortunately their attempt to distinguish between Appearance and Reality
happened to be an outright inversion of the truth. The nightmare vision
of Reality from which they were seeking shelter in the sand-heap of
technique was an illusion generated by this obscurantist technique itself.
The apparent dissolution of a once stable world into a Protean chaos of
innnitesimally small vagrant electrons, which would re-form into an
infinitely complex universe if they were ever to re-form at all, was not
the apocalypse of an appalling Reality; it was the illusory optical effect of
a distortingly dim-active lens; and the nightmare could be dispelled in
an instant by the simple salutary act of dropping this delusively sophis-
ticated apparatus and reverting to the effective use of the naked eye.

The physical eye itself presents a living allegory of this tragi-comedy
of an intellectual malade imagincdrei

*In an organ like the eye there are two points that are equally striking:
the complexity of the structure and the simplicity of the way in which it
works. . . . The eye is a machine composed of an infinite number of
machines which are all extremely complex, yet eyesight is a simple fact.
The eye has merely to open for eyesight to come into action. ... It is this
contrast between the complexity of the organ and the unity of its operation
that is intellectually disconcerting. . . .

'As a general rule, when an object looks simple from one side and in-
finitely composite from the other side, the two aspects are far from being
of equal importance or—to put it more precisely—far from being on a par
with one another in degree of reality. In such cases the simplicity is
intrinsic to the object itself, while the infinite complexity is an effect of
views that we take of it as we reconnoitre it, of disparate symbols through
which our senses or our intelligence represent the object to us, and, in a
more general way, of elements of a different order with which we try to
imitate the object artificially, but with which nevertheless it remains in-
commensurable because its nature is different from theirs.

'An artist of genius has painted a figure on his canvas. We can imitate
his picture in mosaic, in pieces of many colours, and, the smaller and the
more numerous these pieces are, and the greater the variety of their shades