In his head, his hypothesis reduced humans to that of squash balls or soft drink cans; one bounces off walls and obstacles, whilst the other is repeatedly crushed underfoot, hurled in a waste bin or kicked along the pavement. The circumstances that gave rise to whichever reaction didn't seem to matter as Professor Maxwell surmised it was a conditioned response. And perception, it appeared, only cemented an individual's position further.
It was curious, he mused, how people perceived situations differently, even down to a person's mannerisms or mode of speech, or how some felt vulnerable and others challenged by the exact same threat. But what chiefly interested him were the two groups at either end of the scale, those who experienced only one of the extremes, and not the common middle ground. The layperson who managed to govern their emotions and veered somewhere between fight or flight aroused him very little. No, he was after those who were either rabbit-soft or as durable as tanned leather, and more especially those that had a thick skin like a rhinoceros' hide.
In his preliminary studies which he'd had to conduct in order to secure further funding he'd found some volunteers so sensitive they cried over every little thing regardless of whether it affected them directly or not, and others who donned permanent armour every day as if they were perpetually engaged in an ongoing battle. The results of this small study had been quite remarkable and surpassed his own meagre expectations, for he tried never to put his ideas or desirable outcomes above his station knowing full well that he was the maverick within the university. A non-entity in the scientific world; someone who in terms of his success rate didn't figure on any measurable scale, not even Richter's, having had no papers published, and at best was humoured by his more serious colleagues who largely considered his various theories unscientific and therefore unsupportable. They believed, that despite being in his mid-fifties, he had schoolboy whims which the Head of Department and Principal allowed him to indulge in at a cost to the university's academic reputation, and to be more precise felt his merged field of epidemiology and epistemology (medicine and philosophy to the layperson) was all front and no substance.
The
subject, they felt, was everything that science purported not to be:
a new form with a basis in psychology governed by illogical musings
and psyche babble with a smattering of biology, which offered no firm
evidence or reliable conclusions. And they despaired of Maxwell,
omitting the 'Professor' when referring to him in conversation
amongst themselves, feeling strongly that he did their profession a
huge disservice. His scatter-gun approach much frowned upon for
everyone knew he followed his impulsive train of thought, frequently
turning his attention from one study to focus on another. Research,
they felt, should be orderly and his inconstancy set a poor example.
Professor
Maxwell however was never one to listen to reason; in short he was
what his colleagues called dense, only concerned with his own
findings and his maze-like process to them, which was what made his
latest and greatest research by quite some margin so irrational for
the man couldn't see that he was one of the armoured lot he hoped to
discover how to emulate, and had in fact answered as well as
contradicted his own thesis: A thick skin could not be acquired, it
was a gift from the cradle and thus concealed from the receiver's
eyes; inwardly such people failed to see the shield they carry
without.Picture Credit: Rhinoceros by Albrecht Durer, 1515
