Ancestral Experience
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Poincaré, Henri and Halsted, George Bruce
It has often been said that if individual experience could not create geometry the same is not true of ancestral experience. But what does that mean? Is it meant that we could not experimentally demonstrate Euclid's postulate, but that our ancestors have been able to do it? Not in the least. It is meant that by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world, that it has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species: or in other words the most convenient. This is entirely in conformity with our conclusions; geometry is not true, it is advantageous.