Essential McLuhan 132 Many of the new ideas can be expressed in non- mathematical language, but they are none the less difficult on that account. What is demanded is a change in our imaginative picture of the world…. The same sort of change was demanded by Copernicus, when he taught that the earth is not stationary… To us now there is no difficulty in this idea, because we learned it before our mental habits had become fixed. Einstein’s ideas, similarly, will seem easier to generations which grow up with them; but for us a certain effort of imaginative reconstruction is unavoidable. It is simpler to say that if a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly be opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent. As Heinrich Wolfflin stated the matter in 1915, in his revolutionary Principles of Art History (p. 62) “the effect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts.” Wolfflin began working from the discoveries of the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, whose Problem of Form in the Figurative Arts had first clearly explained the disorder in ordinary human sense perception, and the role of art in clarifying this confusion. Hildebrand had shown how tactility was a kind of synesthesia or interplay among the senses, and as such, was the core of the richest art effects. For the low definition imagery of the tactile mode compels the viewer into an active participant role. When Africans watch movies as if they were low definition forms for active participation, we are amused by the incongruity. Working from effect rather than from cause, which we have already seen as native to the Russian, was for us a novel mode of procedure in the later nineteenth century, and will come in for fuller discussion later in this book. A recent work by Georg von Bekesy, Experiments in Hearing, offers an exactly reverse answer to the problem of space to the one which Carothers and Wilson have just given us. Whereas they are trying to talk about the perception of non-literate people in terms of literate experience, Professor von Bekesy chooses to begin his discussion of acoustical space on its own terms. As one proficient in auditory spaces, he is keenly aware of the difficulty of talking about the space of hearing, for the acoustical is 10 necessarily a world in “depth.” It is of the utmost interest that 10See “Acoustic Space.” in trying to elucidate the nature of hearing and of acoustic space, Professor von Bekesy should deliberately avoid viewpoint and perspective