“Physics and math have been able to make their great strides because they deal, actually, with the simplest concepts, which are artificially simplified still further. Newton’s three laws of motion, for instance, assume that no force beyond the one set being considered is acting on a body in question; and the members of this set can be considered one at a time. We never really observe that. There is always friction, gravitation, or some other disturbing influence. Even in space there are externals. What saves physics is that these externals are usually negligibly small.

“Take a particular case. You know the two-body problem in astronomy? Given two bodies of known mass and distance from each other, and the laws of motion and gravitation, to find their position at any past or future time. Well, it’s mathematically simple. It was solved a long time ago, because there are only two interacting bodies, But the three-body problem is quite another story. Right away, with three interactions, it becomes so complex that as far as I know there’s never been any general solution, and only a few special ones. As for the n-body problem—!

“Now in the biological sciences, including psychology and sociology, you can’t simplify. You have to consider the whole. A living organism is an incredibly complex set of interactions, beginning, probably, on the subatomic level and going on up to the universal environment, from which the organism cannot be separated either, acting on and being acted on by that all the time. You can’t apply our single-track analysis methods to such a case. The result is, of course, that those sciences are almost purely empirical, sociology hardly deserving the name. If, to use an illustration that’s been used before, I want to tackle the three-body problem, I can and will start with the special case where one of them has zero mass. But suppose I were making an analysis of the influence of Pan-Asiatic policies on American domestic affairs before the war. I could certainly not ignore the converse case, or the existence of other countries, I’d have to consider them all at once—which no existing math can do. Any results I got would be qualitative, nonmathematical, inexact.”

“I think I see,” nodded Boyd. “Of course, people can think of two or more things at once.”

“That’s different,” said Karen. “That’s a case of divided attention, each branch of the mind following its single track. It’s normal enough, though carried to extremes it becomes schizophrenia.”

“You get what I’m driving at,” went on Wayne. “Our subhuman and human ancestors didn’t need to see the world as a whole. They were only concerned with their immediate surroundings and events. So we never evolved the ability to consider an entire entity. Alaric is a mutant—”

“Some different brain structure,” said Karen quietly. “The reversed internal organs may or may not be a linked characteristic. The X-rays showed no brain difference. They hardly would, as it’s probably a very subtle matter of cellular or colloidal integration.”