The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  Does not the almost universal closure of the eyelids during sleep, while the other senses remain open in a quasi-normal fashion, provide an indication of the enormous importance of the organ for the imagined thesis? If the objection is raised of its delicacy and extreme sensitivity, can one not say that the sensitivity in question is a secondary effect, of the same sort as pleasure in love—that it is an excitation maintaining the rule of the closure of the organ during unconsciousness? The same argument applies to the preponderance of vision in cases of fascination, or Braidism, those terrible instances that precipitate birds into the mouths of serpents, or put hysterics to sleep by means of a bright light.22 There is evidently no doubt that the other senses are subject to the same regulation, but with less intensity. Now, Luc had no intention of denying that all the senses must contain some information relating to the double life, but he directed his research into the easiest path, toward the part of the organism most specifically impregnated with the conditions of the problem.

  Thus, the pre-eminence of the visual apparatus suggested hazardous experiments: saturating eyes with polarized light; grafting the eye of a panther into a human orbit to obtain a duplication of the optic nerve; trying out combinations of forms before the pupil with an objective opposite to hypnotism, awakening instead of putting to sleep; passing light through powerful magnetic fields before directing it at the retina, and so on.

  One morning, remembering a madman’s pupil—the oval, feline pupil of a lunatic submissive to the phases of the moon, who slept rarely and lightly, and whose thoughts were subtle, immaterial and argumentative—he thought of something curious the man had said about “the eternal wakefulness of the soul.” Mingled with metaphysical conceptions, that was the age-old utopia of the nocturnal voyage, in which the soul roams through time and space. Exceptionally, when carried away by excessively distant adventures in the divine world, the soul forgot or was slow to recover its body, death or catalepsy ensued. Among these beliefs, antithetical to Luc’s, one of the madman’s affirmations remained singularly troubling: the latter claimed, in fact, in the times when he was fully conscious, that his monomania was an active sleep, as restful as normal sleep, and cited as proof, in addition to the fact that he almost never slept, the periodicity of his fits, thirty hours apart, each one lasting eight and a half hours, which he could predict perfectly, and which were preceded by a period of uncertainty and fatigue, like quotidian repose in other men. Active sleep! And Luc compared the hypnotic sleep provoked by the eye’s obsession with an object with the madness provoked by the direct obsession of the brain—and sometimes another organ—with an object or a thought. By subtle conversion, perhaps instruments might one day be constructed to act on the eye so as to provoke temporary insanity, just as sleep is provoked today—and how many experiences might be created at that time!

  A fascinating chimera, that madness might be the means adopted by nature to realize the problem of double existence, and that perhaps, in times precursory to that realization, humans might come to understand that progress in seeing madness generalized, channeled and, above all, “rationalized” among them. Unexpected, sudden, cataclysmic fits of madness, if one might put it that way, would become increasingly rare. Their periods would be mathematically anticipated by the alienated themselves. The latter would withdraw voluntarily, in good time, to appropriate habitations: comfortable, even luxurious, refuges. In cases of necessity, fits might be delayed, by the will-power of the monomaniac, as we can delay sleep. From then on, all horror would disappear; subject to general and fixed oscillations, madness would re-enter the regime of organic needs. Slowly extended to all humankind, initially with lacunae of memory and logic, a lack of communication with rational life, it would end up in complete harmony, reconnecting the sparse phenomena of hypnotism, preparing the bipolar life by means of a profound knowledge of all organic deviations, creating new arts, revealing the secret of Fevers, extracting from epidemics the principles that might render it as beneficent and fecund as it presently seems sinister and corrosive!

  5. A New Sense and Cerebral Penetration

  A new sense, sketched by the polarizations of the Double Life, perhaps nurtured but certainly strongly facilitated by Planetary Physiology, can be imagined either as a sort of synthetic harmony of other senses, or as a new localization. It might perhaps be a simple development of the tactility observed in bats, which, although blind, can fly inside a cavern or a building without bumping into the walls, or the directive faculty of birds, or the lateral lines of fishes and salamanders, etc. Has not the supposition of a “homing instinct” in animals, in fact, some analogy with the repetition (for it is evidently a repetition) of music, of the rhythmic singing voice in the human mammal? Monkeys, dogs and pachyderms—all viviparous animals—have either lost the art of singing or not yet acquired it. Birds—descended, like us, from reptiles—had it for millions of years in the midst of unharmonious mammals, in which one can scarcely find a certain coarse and primitive beauty in the roar of the lion or the buffalo. And we, descendants of monkeys, are rediscovering that voice and that harmony, proving that nature can suspend a faculty—emerging from a sense—and subordinate it to ulterior development as well as definitive atrophy. From which follows the quasi-impossibility of classifying organs as superior or inferior in essence, not knowing what future conditions might add to embryonic faculties, and the legitimacy of the hypothesis of further complications of the homing instinct in species of inferior order.

  Using logic of a similar kind, a new sense might be indicated by the as-yet-rudimentary phenomena of hypnotism, or perhaps by a refinement of taste, sight or—most particularly—hearing. Indeed, if one moves forward 50 or 60 precessions of the equinox,23 when barometric pressure has fallen to a half or a quarter of what it is at present (between 250 and 350 millimeters) the difficulty of hearing will have increased in proportion. Moreover, according to Luc, the atmosphere would have been subject to slow modifications of its innate structure, by virtue of new cosmic conditions, and its coefficient of elasticity might have risen in spite of its cooling, the velocity of its aura being considerably increased in consequence, and the ear subject to concomitant metamorphoses. In various attempts at accommodation to the new environmental conditions, the organ could have been modified to the point of perceiving a number of longitudinal vibrations infinitely larger than seems to be demanded a priori by the problem, so that hearing would be replaced by a kind of phonic sight, capable of discerning pulsations in the ether comparable in velocity to light, although retaining the fundamental qualities that constitute sound-waves. That would give rise to a series of data relating to the nature of pressure and the infinitesimal actions and reactions of terrestrial, intersidereal and intermolecular fluids. In consequence, the luminous diaphanousness of certain bodies would be supplemented by a phonic transparency, which would complicate Atomic science considerably.24

  This theme is connected in one sense to the development of a sense electrical in nature or whose nature is “symmetrical” to electricity. Sound waves, in fact, present themselves as a calculation of successive modifications of pressure, and electrical potential—especially the charging and discharging of condensers—offers a close analogy with barometric reactions, which could be represented hydraulically in suitable apparatus. If one adds to this the particular fact that sound is the sole agent that has so far lent itself to intimate metamorphosis and electrical reversibility—which is to say, being transformed into induced electric currents that can be retransformed into sounds identical in form and yield (save for intensity) to the originals—then the secret analogies between sound and electricity seem even more striking.

  If we examine the case of a new sense now, the mode of electrical representation is that every molecule of a body is perceived by an increase in potential, variable or fixed, separate from neutralizations of potential in the interior of the body. That is to say that every body will be defined by the new sense as some differentiation of its general electr
ical state in the context of the environment defined by the series of its magneto-atomic atmospheres. This very rudimentary definition is that of all the senses; it is sufficient to substitute the words light, touch, etc., for that of magnetism or electricity. Its value is, moreover, considerably diminished by special difficulties. If, for example, one admits that nervous conductivity is an electrical conductivity, either direct or inductive, it seems necessary to conclude that hearing, sight and touch are homologues of telephony, in which sound is only transmitted by metamorphosis, so that the impact of an exterior phenomenon is not perceived in itself but by the modifications it imports to internal currents, and perhaps by retransformations in apparatus as-yet-undefined.

  Given this, one is tempted to conclude that the perception of the environment requires at least two factors, one reacting upon the other, unless one prefers to suggest the introduction of inverted orders of conductivity—for example, a neuro-luminous or neuro-phonic conductive network integrated into our hypothetical electrical conductive system, a transformation so important that only seems to be realized in differentiating us as much from ourselves as vertebrates from protozoa. If one rejects the inversion of conductivities, it is necessary either to deny that our internal conductivity is electrical, or to overcome the objection of two factors. In the latter case, the solution would be symbolically analogous to the construction of some inductive balance indicating variations which, as such, would be electrical in form, while known balances only vary in the form of the augmentation or diminution of sounds, contacts, withdrawals, approaches, etc., modifying the conductivity of circuits or the flow of motive forces.

  Now, this construction, which is beyond our present means of imaginative representation, leads, every time one tries to get past it, to the attribution to the magnetic atmosphere of atoms of a characteristic number of vibrations, and, the perception of transversal vibrations already being perceived by one of our senses in a condition of excessive velocity, the mind is more inclined to admit prodigiously rapid longitudinal vibrations—with the result that, as previously observed, the problem of the electrical sense appears to have a much greater affinity with the problem of a much improved phonic sense.

  This viewpoint receives some further confirmation if one reflects on the “harmonic” proportionality of chemical combinations, the simple rules of volume that so closely resemble musical rules and make one think of a symphony of atoms too infinitesimal in the present time to be perceived by our atmosphere-attuned ears. Now, Faraday has added electrical equivalents to chemical equivalent; does this not prove that, in the phenomenon of electrolysis, the output of electricity is a form of sonorous—musical, even—etheric wave regulated by geometrical laws analogous to those of the dimensions of strings, blades and tubes?

  In sum, the hypothesis of a localized electric sense was therefore connected, for Luc, with the progression of static phenomena of etheric barometry and of dynamic modifications of etheric pressure of a sonic form. This solution set aside the objection of two factors, either by separating or fundamentally unifying electricity and sound. In the former case, the longitudinal vibration of atomic atmospheres accompanies the potential without being confused with it, but always reveals itself by its vibratory proportionality; in the second case, undulation and electricity are synonymous and nature has thus far resolved the problem in hearing, sound only being differentiated from electricity by effects of atmospheric mass opposed to effects of etheric mass, which one might suppose, in the refinement of the new sense, with less intensity, the relationship air/ether being replaced by the relationship ethern/etherm.

  Luc’s preferences, however, did not go so far as denying that the new sense might originate outside phonomorphic phenomena. The researches of Faraday, Maxwell and many others, open up the seductive hypothesis of lumino-magnetic links, a theory of molecular vortices: electrical effects on rotatory polarization seem, in the relevant experiments, confirmative of these ideas, although the influence of a current or a magnet on polarized or normal light is not fundamentally incompatible with a phonoelectric theory (inasmuch as Becquerel’s objection, suggesting the deformation of experimental substances, is plausible).25

  Luc was also able to forge a hybrid, phono-luminous, theory by proposing that the perpendicularity of the two effects of a current is symptomatic of the fact that electromagnetism is, in the final analysis, a lumino-phonism, flow along linear wires and the pile being assimilated, etherically, to a longitudinal vibration, and the transversal effect being assimilated to sub- and hyper-luminal vibrations of the spectrum, or vice versa. Nevertheless, these imaginations seemed less fecund, for the conception of a New Sense, than the first, phono-electric, conception; they demanded a refinement of the eye, or a hybrid oculo-auricular sense.

  Now, a refinement of the eye, when that organ already measures such infinitesimal etheric pulsations, lends itself poorly to the dream, and the hybrid sense comes back in the end to the analysis of each of the two combined senses—so Luc preferred to immerse himself in the thesis of an independent, morphologically essential electricity, an abysm full of entities, full of vagueness and mysticism, in which the theorem of the two factors posed itself more rigorously, and where the seductive chimera of something “symmetrical” to electricity could react upon itself. In truth, in respect of that symmetry, Luc’s imagination could scarcely get past concepts of functional inversion—for example, that conductivity might be manifest in present day dielectrics, that threads of silk, resin and gutta-percha might transmit currents from piles or new dynamos: ideas as seemingly absurd as admitting to bodies reputed to be limp, an elasticity complementary to that of elastic bodies.

  “Is it not analogous tendencies that lead the mystical soul beyond all the nebulas, to alternative Matter, to the pole of Creation opposed to the Infinity, Reason and Equilibrium of ours? There, the Unknowable is not divided into heavenly bodies; there, the Mysteries of Genesis do not lie in the sanctuaries of Suns, Heat and Light, Electricity and Sound, and the Mechanics of Solids, Liquids and Gases are not modes of Existence. The very Essence of Forces, Mass and Density, Difference and Similitude, Space and Duration, still accompany phenomena there, but are strangers to our Geometry, ungraspable by our analysis. Plunged into the reverie of that gulf, where no form is conceivable for us, a fundamental passion, an invincible instinct attracts our being, without hope trembling in our soul for a single second in perceiving some infinitesimal notion, without our ceasing to sense that distance is, for us, the offspring of the Other Pole, Unreachable in the Eternity of Time and Space. A dream confused and empty, then, forever futile and awakening neither image nor thought within us? Whoever has plunged into it, however, comes back from that inconceivable vagueness with a subtle and profound fever, a mysterious ability to penetrate deeper into our own universe, the sharp impression of having obtained nothing but anguish and terror from the Other Matter, the Pole of Creation opposed to the Infinity, Reason and Equilibrium of Ours, unable to be indifferent to the development of our Being, and especially to our enlarged concept of the possible.”

  The new sense is connected to the nature of Cerebral Penetration.26 In all probability, none of the future developments of the organism arouse more mysterious terror and vague hatred. The violation of the self, the devirginalization of nascent thoughts, seems execrable even on the part of adored beings, and the repulsion of the idea of cerebral sharing is so violent that few people can endure the communion—superficial as it is—of reading a book or a newspaper while tortured by the neighborhood of an eye scanning the same words as their own eyes.

  That our volitions might be rendered as perceptible as our physical actions, every delicate soul conceives with the most legitimate horror—and does not the supposition that custom might erase the repugnance deprive us of a charming modesty, in direct relation to the progress of being, the inferior man and the beast being infinitely less sensitive to it? Thus, the mind likes to imagine new defensive means, isolations of thought similar to the isol
ation of an electrical apparatus, interpositions of obscuring forces relying on the investigative forces.

  The transcendent man already finds a shield in transcendence itself, his lofty speculations becoming closed to mediocrities in terms of etheric transmission as well as aural transmission. But that is too little, in truth, inasmuch as the power of a creator does not shelter him from assimilatory souls. What does sheltering a few rare ideas matter, if our sensations and quotidian thoughts, the very foundations of our life, become anyone’s prey? No impressionable person can resign himself to that; everyone would prefer to keep his inner being hermetically sealed—and how can the conclusion be avoided that the determination in question, perpetually transmitted through human generations, must have created defenses against cerebral penetration and discovered superior laws of organic dissimulation; that, to the finesse of the attack, being must have opposed a finesse of reception warning of the concentration of another thought upon our own, inviting us to closure; and that lies and equivocation by etheric means must present more subtle analogies with oratory lies and equivocation?

  According to Luc, cerebral penetration will develop in phenomena distinct from mental suggestion by hypnosis, and even more so from deductive divination. In divination by hypnosis, the factors are due, it is believed, to phenomena of concomitance, to a synchronic preparation of the induced individual and the inducing individual, or even a mere assistant. The surroundings, the succession of contingencies and the involuntary metamorphoses of the physiognomy form as many signs, as many elements of language, and as many cryptographic themes from which the Subject—in an extreme state of concentration and psycho-nervous refinement, endowed with tactilities and visibilities that permit the fluid interpretation of any contraction of nervous fibers—obtains a maximum of interpretation. Now, the transmission of thought, after the acquisitions of the double life, planetary physiology and the new sense should not be based on any indirect deduction or reading.