Touch

Use in the book

The Aristotelian notice makes touching occur through an intervening body, identified as air, water, or something common to the two. It then explains why this medium usually escapes notice: the distance is short, as in taste. The claim belongs to the transmitted formulation, including its editorially supplied words, and should not be silently rewritten to match a fuller account from elsewhere.

Places to read

1. I.56.1.1Touch is explained through a body between flesh and object.
2. I.56.1.2Short distance conceals the intervening medium.

Translation in this edition

“Touch” names the perception, and “what is touched” its object. The language of mediation is retained even where ordinary English suggests direct contact.

Use in the book

Theophrastus records no separate Empedoclean mechanism for touch beyond fitting. He does, however, report pleasure from like things in both parts and blend, then uses tactile pleasure as a test of affinity: if kindred things produce greatest pleasure by contact, things grown together should be most pleased and most perceptive.

The rough-and-smooth objection asks how tactile qualities can be recognized through effluence or fitting into passages. It tests the transfer of a common physical explanation to a sense whose characteristic objects appear to require more than an emitted stream. Aristotle's statement that taste is a kind of touch is a useful piece of the dossier's later conceptual framing, but is not explicitly ascribed to Empedocles. The entry therefore keeps the general contact principle, the particular sensory modality, and affective responses to touching analytically separate.

Places to read

1. A 86 § 9 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 9. Reports the absence of a distinct account of touch.
2. A 86 §§ 16–17 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 16. Tests tactile pleasure by the counterexample of things grown together.
3. A 86 §§ 20–21 (polemical)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 20. Questions how effluence explains rough and smooth.
4. A 94 (polemical)Aristotle, On Sense and Sense-Objects. Introduces his taste discussion by calling taste a kind of touch.

Translation in this edition

The same noun serves “contact” in §15 and “touch” in §§9 and 20. Translation should distinguish the contextual function rather than creating two unrelated Greek terms.

Use in the book

An introduction2345 in §523 becomes a literal mutual examination. The old formula requires a person both to feel and to be felt; the abbreviated urban form assumes reciprocity without saying it. The fashionable construction then makes feel mean arranging the whole encounter. This miniature linguistic history is more than a joke about slang. It shows a social procedure becoming so habitual that its terms can be compressed, while the narrator remains more alert to damaged grammar than to the procedure's class assumptions.

Feeling answers a genuine epistemic problem. A line-shaped appearance cannot simply disclose how many sides a person possesses, whereas one angle, if regularity can be assumed, provides sufficient evidence. Touch is consequently a rational technique in the fictional world. It is not refuted by the prestige of sight recognition. The higher method is safer at a distance and allows subtler distinctions, but it also costs time and money, and its possessors forbid inferiors to verify their rank by contact.

The technique's danger makes hierarchy painfully physical. The Felt must remain motionless, and an involuntary movement can kill the Feeler. The Square's ancestor is punished after a rheumatic start transfixes a Polygon. The account allows distress for the family while treating the nobleman's greater public value as obvious. The intimate contact does not produce equal vulnerability in the social consequences that follow it.

The classroom passage takes the contradiction to its limit. Children practise Feeling on immobilised living specimens whose nourishment is discussed as a cost. A word associated with responsiveness now names an activity made possible by refusing the touched body's claims. The young acquire “tact and intelligence” through an arrangement from which compassion has been excluded. Abbott does not need to insert the abstract charge of insensitivity; the double meaning is working throughout the description.

The prohibition of Feeling among the educated thus has two readings. It develops a difficult faculty by withholding an easier one, but it also converts refusal of contact into an emblem of superiority. Those who can avoid the bodies of others appear cultivated. Those who must touch are classified as lower, even when their method is more reliable than hearing and capable of remarkable precision.

Places to read

1. §523“feel and be felt”
2. §523“the principal test of recognition”
3. §523“the brainless vertex of an acute-angled Isosceles”
4. §523“one little accident in the process of Feeling”
5. §523“that tact and intelligence”
6. §6234“discouraged or absolutely forbidden”

In this edition

Notes 54–552 discuss introduction2345 etiquette and Abbott's interest in English usage; notes 59–6123 address measurement and classroom specimens. The spelling and capitalisation in the narrative distinguish a named method without cancelling the ordinary moral resonances of feeling.

Feeler

The person actively touching another figure’s angle to identify him. The capitalised role distinguishes the vulnerable examiner from the person examined, making the risks of a sneeze or movement central to the rules of the encounter. Printed form: Feeler (§ 523). See Feeling and touch.

Feeling

The practised identification of another figure by touching an angle. It is chiefly a test of class rather than personal identity, and its double role as physical contact and polite introduction2345 exposes the social conventions embedded in a sensory act. Printed form: Feeling (§ 523). See Feeling and touch.

Felt

The person whose angle is being touched during recognition. Used as a substantive, it names a temporary social role whose duty is complete stillness, since even an involuntary movement may fatally pierce the Feeler. Printed form: Felt (§ 523). See Feeling and touch.

Introduction

The formal presentation of one person to another through a mutual acquaintance. Flatland makes the convention materially testable: an introduction2345 licenses reciprocal contact through which the parties establish each other’s geometric and social rank. Printed form: introduction2345 (§ 523). See Feeling and touch.

Miscarriage

An unfortunate accident or disastrous failure, not a lost pregnancy in this context. It denotes the narrator’s ancestor accidentally piercing a Polygon during Feeling, an event whose consequences extend through the family’s inherited status. Printed form: miscarriage (§ 523). See Feeling and touch.

Feel and be felt by (contextual phrase)

“feel and be felt by” (§ 523)

The older formula of introduction2345 spells out reciprocal action: each stranger will inspect the other’s angle and submit to the same examination. Its balanced active and passive verbs make equality within the encounter audible, even though the purpose is to discover unequal rank. Successive urban shortenings omit the explicit passive half and eventually make feel mean introduce. The narrator complains of linguistic degeneration, but the transformation also shows how a bodily procedure can become conventional social shorthand. A courteous introduction2345 grants access to information that cannot be read directly from an apparent outline. Because an unexpected movement may kill the examiner, the formal words are backed by an exacting discipline of stillness. Etiquette here manages physical exposure as well as reputation. See Feeling and touch, Angle, and Language and gender.

Expense is the truest economy (contextual phrase)

“expense is the truest economy” (§ 523)

The maxim ordinarily defends paying more for better quality or greater durability. The Square applies it to replacing living classroom specimens instead of keeping them fed. Frequent replacement preserves accurate angles for the pupils to handle and, in his account, slightly reduces the supposedly redundant Isosceles population. A recognisable household principle thus carries the reader across an appalling shift in what counts as an expense and what counts as a benefit. Neither the specimen’s life nor its suffering appears as a cost in the calculation. The cheap system is not innocent either, since it still confines people as apparatus, but the narrator’s preferred economy makes their deaths an additional advantage. The smooth proverbial ending presents that judgment as practical wisdom. See Education and schools, Feeling and touch, and Artisan and soldier.