Our image of the natural world has been greatly enlarged by the improvement of our senses - better eyes (telescopes, microscopes, ability to receive electromagnetic waves in frequency bands other than visible light), better ears, better chemical detectors, atom smashers and particle detectors, etc. In a certain sense the `box' we call Nature in which we find ourselves has become very large, from the scale of quarks to the scale of quasars. But one characteristic of this greatly widened view of the universe that we have at this time is common to a characteristic at other times. That characteristic is that we think we are seeing, not everything, but everything that is crucial to getting the big picture so that somehow our model of our surroundings is more or less in agreement with `Reality'.

The lesson to be learned from past `misconceptions' is that we almost certainly have similar misconceptions of `Reality' today, and that our image of our surroundings will be changed radically in the coming decades. Some of this can be seen today with our hypothesizing of `dark energy' and `missing mass', ideas very much similar to that of the ether, that had been postulated as the medium necessary to support the propagation of light. But other images of those changes are totally outside the scope of our vision, and we don't even know of the existence of phenomena which are unexpected, unimagined and outside the `box' of our perception. Our present view of Nature is examined in view of the arrogance we, humankind, exhibit, and have always exhibited, in our quest for an `understanding of Reality'.