by John Bunyan
Before I left I wrote a line to Lawson. I began by transcribing the verses from the twenty-third chapter of Second Kings. I told him what I had done, and my reason. ‘I take the whole responsibility upon myself,’ I wrote. ‘No man in the place had anything to do with it but me. I acted as I did for the sake of our old friendship, and you will believe it was no easy task for me. I hope you will understand. Whenever you are able to see me send me word, and I will come back and settle with you. But I think you will realise that I have saved your soul.’
The afternoon was merging into twilight as I left the house on the road to Taqui. The great fire, where the grove had been, was still blazing fiercely, and the smoke made a cloud over the upper glen, and filled all the air with a soft violet haze. I knew that I had done well for my friend, and that he would come to his senses and be grateful. My mind was at ease on that score, and in something like comfort I faced the future. But as the car reached the ridge I looked back to the vale I had outraged. The moon was rising and silvering the smoke, and through the gaps I could see the tongues of fire. Somehow, I know not why, the lake, the stream, the garden-coverts, even the green slopes of hill, wore an air of loneliness and desecration.
And then my heartache returned, and I knew that I had driven something lovely and adorable from its last refuge on earth.
Space
J’ai dit que nous pourrions concevoir, vivant dans notre monde, des êtres pensants dont le tableau de distribution serait à quatre dimensions et qui par conséquent penseraient dans l’hyperespace. Il n’est pas certain toutefois que de pareils êtres, en admettant qu’ils y naissent, pourraient y vivre et s’y défendre contre les mille dangers dont ils y seraient assaillis.
H. POINCARÉ: Science et Méthode
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.
PASCAL
Leithen told me this story one evening in early September as we sat beside the pony track which gropes its way from Glenaicill up the Correi na Sidhe. I had arrived that afternoon from the south, while he had been taking an off-day from a week’s stalking, so we had walked up the glen together after tea to get the news of the forest. A rifle was out on the Correi na Sidhe beat, and a thin spire of smoke had risen from the top of Sgurr Dearg to show that a stag had been killed at the burn-head. The lumpish hill pony with its deer-saddle had gone up the Correi in a gillie’s charge, while we followed at leisure, picking our way among the loose granite rocks and the patches of wet bogland. The track climbed high on one of the ridges of Sgurr Dearg, till it hung over a caldron of green glen with the Alt-na-Sidhe churning in its linn a thousand feet below. It was a breathless evening, I remember, with a pale-blue sky just clearing from the haze of the day. West-wind weather may make the North, even in September, no bad imitation of the Tropics, and I sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hours had been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg. By and by we sat down on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet. The clatter of the pony’s hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had gone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling. No place on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season before the stags have begun roaring, for there are no sheep with their homely noises, and only the rare croak of a raven breaks the silence. The hillside was far from sheer – one could have walked down with a little care – but something in the shape of the hollow and the remote gleam of white water gave it an air of extraordinary depth and space. There was a shimmer left from the day’s heat, which invested bracken and rock and scree with a curious airy unreality. One could almost have believed that the eye had tricked the mind, that all was mirage, that five yards from the path the solid earth fell away into nothingness. I have a bad head, and instinctively I drew farther back into the heather. Leithen’s eyes were looking vacantly before him.
‘Did you ever know Hollond?’ he asked.
Then he laughed shortly. ‘I don’t know why I asked that, but somehow this place reminded me of Hollond. That glimmering hollow looks as if it were the beginning of eternity. It must be eerie to live with the feeling always on one.’
Leithen seemed disinclined for further exercise. He lit a pipe and smoked quietly for a little. ‘Odd that you didn’t know Hollond. You must have heard his name. I thought you amused yourself with metaphysics.’
Then I remembered. There had been an erratic genius who had written some articles in Mind on that dreary subject, the mathematical conception of infinity. Men had praised them to me, but I confess I never quite understood their argument. ‘Wasn’t he some sort of mathematical professor?’ I asked.
‘He was, and, in his own way, a tremendous swell. He wrote a book on Number, which has translations in every European language. He is dead now, and the Royal Society founded a medal in his honour. But I wasn’t thinking of that side of him.’
It was the time and place for a story, for the pony would not be back for an hour. So I asked Leithen about the other side of Hollond which was recalled to him by Correi na Sidhe. He seemed a little unwilling to speak …
‘I wonder if you will understand it. You ought to, of course, better than me, for you know something of philosophy. But it took me a long time to get the hang of it, and I can’t give you any kind of explanation. He was my fag at Eton, and when I began to get on at the Bar I was able to advise him on one or two private matters, so that he rather fancied my legal ability. He came to me with his story because he had to tell someone, and he wouldn’t trust a colleague. He said he didn’t want a scientist to know, for scientists were either pledged to their own theories and wouldn’t understand, or, if they understood, would get ahead of him in his researches. He wanted a lawyer, he said, who was accustomed to weighing evidence. That was good sense, for evidence must always be judged by the same laws, and I suppose in the long-run the most abstruse business comes down to a fairly simple deduction from certain data. Anyhow, that was the way he used to talk, and I listened to him, for I liked the man, and had an enormous respect for his brains. At Eton he sluiced down all the mathematics they could give him, and he was an astonishing swell at Cambridge. He was a simple fellow, too, and talked no more jargon than he could help. I used to climb with him in the Alps now and then, and you would never have guessed that he had any thoughts beyond getting up steep rocks.
‘It was at Chamonix, I remember, that I first got a hint of the matter that was filling his mind. We had been taking an off-day, and were sitting in the hotel garden, watching the Aiguilles getting purple in the twilight. Chamonix always makes me choke a little – it is so crushed in by those great snow masses. I said something about it – said I liked open spaces like the Gornergrat or the Bel Alp better. He asked me why: if it was the difference of the air, or merely the wider horizon? I said it was the sense of not being crowded, of living in an empty world. He repeated the word “empty” and laughed.
‘“By ‘empty’ you mean”, he said, “where things don’t knock up against you?”
‘I told him No. I mean just empty, void, nothing but blank ether.
‘“You don’t knock up against things here, and the air is as good as you want. It can’t be the lack of ordinary emptiness you feel.”
‘I agreed that the word needed explaining. “I suppose it is mental restlessness,” I said. “I like to feel that for a tremendous distance there is nothing round me. Why, I don’t know. Some men are built the other way and have a terror of space.”
‘He said that that was better. “It is a personal fancy, and depends on your knowing that there is nothing between you and the top of the Dent Blanche. And you know because your eyes tell you there is nothing. Even if you were blind, you might have a sort of sense about adjacent matter. Blind men often have it. But in any case, whether got from instinct or sight, the knowledge is what matters.”
‘Hollond was embarking on a Socratic dialogue in which I could see little point. I told him so, and he laughed.
‘“I am not sure that I am very clear mys
elf. But yes – there is a point. Supposing you knew – not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition – that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real – as real to the mind. Would you still feel crowded?”
‘“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. It is only what we call matter that signifies. It would be just as well not to feel crowded by the other thing, for there would be no escape from it. But what are you getting at? Do you mean atoms or electric currents or what?”
‘He said he wasn’t thinking about that sort of thing, and began to talk of another subject.
‘Next night, when we were pigging it at the Géant cabane, he started again on the same tack. He asked me how I accounted for the fact that animals could find their way back over great tracts of unknown country. I said I supposed it was the homing instinct.
‘“Rubbish, man,” he said. “That’s only another name for the puzzle, not an explanation. There must be some reason for it. They must know something that we cannot understand. Tie a cat in a bag and take it fifty miles by train and it will make its way home. That cat has some clue that we haven’t.”
‘I was tired and sleepy, and told him that I did not care a rush about the psychology of cats. But he was not to be snubbed, and went on talking.
‘“How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.”
‘But at that point I fell asleep and left Hollond to repeat his questions to a guide who knew no English and a snoring porter.
‘Six months later, one foggy January afternoon, Hollond rang me up at the Temple and proposed to come to see me that night after dinner. I thought he wanted to talk Alpine shop, but he turned up in Duke Street about nine with a kit-bag full of papers. He was an odd fellow to look at – a yellowish face with the skin stretched tight on the cheek-bones, clean shaven, a sharp chin which he kept poking forward, and deep-set, greyish eyes. He was a hard fellow too, always in pretty good condition, which was remarkable considering how he slaved for nine months out of the twelve. He had a quiet, slow-spoken manner, but that night I saw that he was considerably excited.
‘He said that he had come to me because we were old friends. He proposed to tell me a tremendous secret. “I must get another mind to work on it or I’ll go crazy. I don’t want a scientist. I want a plain man.”
‘Then he fixed me with a look like a tragic actor’s. “Do you remember that talk we had in August at Chamonix – about Space? I daresay you thought I was playing the fool. So I was in a sense, but I was feeling my way towards something which has been in my mind for ten years. Now I have got it, and you must hear about it. You may take my word that it’s a pretty startling discovery.”
‘I lit a pipe and told him to go ahead, warning him that I knew about as much science as the dust-man.
‘I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an “empty homogeneous medium”. “Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all. That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that view. An animal, for instance. It feels a kind of quality in Space. It can find its way over new country, because it perceives certain landmarks, not necessarily material, but perceptible, or if you like intelligible. Take an Australian savage. He has the same power, and, I believe, for the same reason. He is conscious of intelligible landmarks.”
‘“You mean what people call a sense of direction,” I put in.
‘“Yes, but what in Heaven’s name is a sense of direction? The phrase explains nothing. However incoherent the mind of the animal or the savage may be, it is there somewhere, working on some data. I’ve been all through the psychological and anthropological side of the business, and after you eliminate clues from sight and hearing and smell and half-conscious memory there remains a solid lump of the inexplicable.”
‘Hollond’s eye had kindled, and he sat doubled up in his chair, dominating me with a finger.
‘“Here, then, is a power which man is civilising himself out of. Call it anything you like, but you must admit that it is a power. Don’t you see that it is a perception of another kind of reality that we are leaving behind us?… Well, you know the way nature works. The wheel comes full circle, and what we think we have lost we regain in a higher form. So for a long time I have been wondering whether the civilised mind could not recreate for itself this lost gift, the gift of seeing the quality of Space. I mean that I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences, intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.”
‘I found all this very puzzling, and he had to repeat it several times before I got a glimpse of what he was talking about.
‘“I’ve wondered for a long time,” he went on, “but now, quite suddenly, I have begun to know.” He stopped and asked me abruptly if I knew much about mathematics.
‘“It’s a pity,” he said, “but the main point is not technical, though I wish you could appreciate the beauty of some of my proofs.” Then he began to tell me about his last six months’ work. I should have mentioned that he was a brilliant physicist besides other things. All Hollond’s tastes were on the borderlands of sciences, where mathematics fades into metaphysics and physics merges in the abstrusest kind of mathematics. Well, it seems he had been working for years at the ultimate problem of matter, and especially of that rarefied matter we call ether or space. I forget what his view was – atoms or molecules or electric waves. If he ever told me I have forgotten, but I’m not certain that I ever knew. However, the point was that these ultimate constituents were dynamic and mobile, not a mere passive medium but a medium in constant movement and change. He claimed to have discovered – by ordinary inductive experiment – that the constituents of ether possessed certain functions, and moved in certain figures obedient to certain mathematical laws. Space, I gathered, was perpetually “forming fours” in some fancy way.
‘Here he left his physics and became the mathematician. Among his mathematical discoveries had been certain curves or figures or something whose behaviour involved a new dimension. I gathered that this wasn’t the ordinary Fourth Dimension that people talk of, but that fourth-dimensional inwardness or involution was part of it. The explanation lay in the pile of manuscripts he left with me, but though I tried honestly I couldn’t get the hang of it. My mathematics stopped with desperate finality just as he got into his subject.
‘His point was that the constituents of Space moved according to these new mathematical figures of his. They were always changing, but the principles of their change were as fixed as the law of gravitation. Therefore, if you once grasped these principles you knew the contents of the void. What do you make of that?’
I said that it seemed to me a reasonable enough argument, but that it got one very little way forward. ‘A man’, I said, ’might know the contents of Space and the laws of their arrangement and yet be unable to see anything more than his fellows. It is a purely academic knowledge. His mind knows it as the result of many deductions, but his senses perceive nothing.’
Leithen laughed. ‘Just what I said to Hollond. He asked the opinion of my legal mind. I said I could not pronounce on his argument,
but that I could point out that he had established no trait d’union between the intellect which understood and the senses which perceived. It was like a blind man with immense knowledge but no eyes, and therefore no peg to hang his knowledge on and make it useful. He had not explained his savage or his cat. “Hang it, man,” I said, “before you can appreciate the existence of your Spacial forms you have to go through elaborate experiments and deductions. You can’t be doing that every minute. Therefore you don’t get any nearer to the use of the sense you say that man once possessed, though you can explain it a bit.”’
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘The funny thing was that he never seemed to see my difficulty. When I kept bringing him back to it he shied off with a new wild theory of perception. He argued that the mind can live in a world of realities without any sensuous stimulus to connect them with the world of our ordinary life. Of course that wasn’t my point. I supposed that this world of Space was real enough to him, but I wanted to know how he got there. He never answered me. He was the typical Cambridge man, you know – dogmatic about uncertainties, but curiously diffident about the obvious. He laboured to get me to understand the notion of his mathematical forms, which I was quite willing to take on trust from him. Some queer things he said, too. He took our feeling about Left and Right as an example of our instinct for the quality of Space. But when I objected that Left and Right varied with each object, and only existed in connection with some definite material thing, he said that that was exactly what he meant. It was an example of the mobility of the Spacial forms. Do you see any sense in that?’
I. shook my head. It seemed to me pure craziness.
‘And then he tried to show me what he called the “involution of Space”, by taking two points on a piece of paper. The points were a foot away when the paper was flat, but they coincided when it was doubled up. He said that there were no gaps between the figures, for the medium was continuous, and he took as an illustration the loops on a cord. You are to think of a cord always looping and unlooping itself according to certain mathematical laws. Oh, I tell you, I gave up trying to follow him. And he was so desperately in earnest all the time. By his account Space was a sort of mathematical pandemonium.’
