The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts Page A

them—
    that the outline of the figure is also the inline of the background. Let us suppose that my circle/hole figure were to move through the following series of shapes:
    Most people would thereupon ascribe the movement, the act, to the enclosed area as if it were an amoeba. But I might just as well have been drawing the dry patches in a thin film of water spread over a polished table. But the point is that, in either case, the movement of any feature of the world cannot be ascribed to the outside alone or to the inside alone. Both move together.
    Our difficulty in noticing both the presence and the action of the background in these simple illustrations is immensely increased when it comes to the behavior of living organisms. When we watch ants scurrying hither and thither over a patch of sand, or people milling around in a public square, it seems absolutely undeniable that the ants and the people are alone responsible for the movement. Yet in fact this is only a highly complex version of the simple problem of the three balls moving in space, in which we had to settle for the solution that the entire configuration (Gestalt) is moving—not the balls alone, not the space alone, not even the balls and the space together in concert, but rather a single field of solid/space of which the balls and the space are, as it were, poles.
    The illusion that organisms move entirely on their own is immensely persuasive until we settle down, as scientists do, to describe their behavior carefully. Then the scientist, be he biologist, sociologist, or physicist, finds very rapidly that he cannot say what the organism is doing unless, at the same time, he describes the behavior of its surroundings. Obviously, an organism cannot be described as walking just in terms of leg motion, for the direction and speed of this walking must be described in terms of the ground upon which it moves.
    Furthermore, this walking is seldom haphazard. It has something to do with food-sources in the area, with the hostile or friendly behavior of other organisms, and countless other factors which we do not immediately consider when attention is first drawn to a prowling ant.
    The more detailed the description of our ant's behavior becomes, the more it has to include such matters as density, humidity, and temperature of the surrounding atmosphere, the types and sources of its food, the social structure of its own species, and that of neighboring species with which it has some symbiotic or preying relationship.
    When at last the whole vast list is compiled, and the scientist calls
    "Finish!" for lack of further time or interest, he may well have the impression that the ant's behavior is no more than its automatic and involuntary reaction to its environment. It is attracted by this, repelled by that, kept alive by one condition, and destroyed by another. But let us suppose that he turns his attention to some other organism in the ant's neighborhood—perhaps a housewife with a greasy kitchen—he will soon have to include that ant, and all its friends and relations, as something which determines her behavior! Wherever he turns his attention, he finds, instead of some positive, causal agent, a merely responsive hollow whose boundaries go this way and that according to outside pressures.
    Yet, on second thought, this won't do. What does it mean , he asks himself, that a description of what the ant is doing must include what its environment is doing? It means that the thing or entity he is studying and describing has changed. It started out to be the individual ant, but it very quickly became the whole field of activities in which the ant is found. The same thing would happen if one started out to describe a particular organ of the body: it would be utterly unintelligible unless one took into account its relationship with other organs. It is thus that every scientific discipline for the study of living organisms—
    bacteriology, botany, zoology, biology,