William James tried to learn from squirrels too. (But he never said anything about the geometrically-reconfigured ones apparently seen near the JUB last Thursday.) How you look at something has a lot to do with how you see it, & vice versa. Or as a wise Yogi may once have said, you can observe a lot by watching.
Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, Ireturned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in aferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was asquirrel–a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of atree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a humanbeing was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sightof the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter howfast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction,and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that nevera glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem nowis this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT?…Pragmatism, II
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