The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

by René Guénon

  It will be as well to add here incidentally a further note on something that may perhaps seem to be only a singularity or a curiosity, but will furnish the occasion for some further remarks later: the ‘guardians of the hidden treasure’, who are at the same time the smiths working in the ‘subterranean fire’, are represented in the different ‘legends’ sometimes as giants and sometimes as dwarfs. Something of the kind is also found in the case of the Kabires, and this shows that this category of symbolism is, like others, capable of being applied so as to relate it to a superior order; but owing to the conditions of our own period, it is necessary to adhere to a point of view from which only what may be called its ‘infernal’ aspect can be seen; in other words, the said conditions are no more than an expression of influences belonging to the inferior and ‘tenebrous’ side of what may be called the ‘cosmic psychism’; and, as will appear more clearly as this study proceeds, influences of this sort, in their multitudinous forms, are today actively threatening the ‘solidity’ of the world.

  To complete this short summary, one more point related to the ‘malefic’ aspect of the influence of metals must be mentioned, and that is the frequent prohibition of the carrying of metallic objects while certain rites are being accomplished, both in the case of exoteric rites,[97] and in the case of initiatic rites properly so called.[98] The character of all rules of this kind is no doubt principally symbolical, and from that character they derive their profound significance; but it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the truly traditional symbolism (which must on no account be confused with the false interpretations and counterfeits to which the moderns sometimes wrongly apply these words)[99] always has an effective meaning, and that its ritual applications in particular have perfectly real effects, although the narrowly limited faculties of modern man can rarely perceive them. This is not a question of vaguely ‘idealistic’ notions, but on the contrary concerns things of which the reality is sometimes manifested in a more or less ‘tangible’ way; if that were not the case, what would be the explanation of the fact that there are people who, when they are in a particular spiritual state, cannot endure the least contact, even indirect, with metals, and that this is so even if the contact has been brought about without their knowledge and in conditions such that it is impossible that they should be aware of it through their bodily senses, thereby necessarily excluding the psychological and over-simplified explanation of ‘auto-suggestion’?[100] It can further be stated that a contact of this kind can in comparable cases go so far as to produce outwardly the physiological effects of a real burn, and it must be admitted that such facts ought to provide material for reflection, if the moderns were still capable of anything of the kind; but the profane and materialistic attitude and the prejudices arising out of it have plunged them into an incurable blindness.

  23

  Time Changed into Space

  In an earlier chapter it was stated that in a certain sense time consumes space, and that it does so in consequence of the power of contraction contained in it, which tends continuously to reduce the spatial expansion to which it is opposed: but time, in its active opposition to the antagonistic principle, unfolds itself with ever-growing speed, for it is far from being homogenous, as people who consider it solely from a quantitative point of view imagine, but on the contrary it is ‘qualified’ at every moment in a different way by the cyclical conditions of the manifestation to which it belongs. The acceleration of time is becoming more apparent than ever in our day, because it becomes exaggerated in the final periods of a cycle, but it nevertheless actually goes on constantly from the beginning of the cycle to the end: it can therefore be said not only that time compresses space, but also that time is itself subject to a progressive contraction, appearing in the proportionate shortening of the four Yugas, with all that this implies, not excepting the corresponding diminution in the length of human life. It is sometimes said, doubtless without any understanding of the real reason, that today men live faster than in the past, and this is literally true; the haste with which the moderns characteristically approach everything they do being ultimately only a consequence of the confused impressions they experience.

  If carried to its extreme limit the contraction of time would in the end reduce it to a single instant, and then duration would really have ceased to exist, for it is evident that there can no longer be any succession within the instant. Thus it is that ‘time the devourer ends by devouring itself’, in such a way that, at the ‘end of the world’, that is to say at the extreme limit of cyclical manifestation, ‘there will be no more time’; this is also why it is said that ‘death is the last being to die’, for wherever there is no succession of any kind death is no longer possible.[101] As soon as succession has come to an end, or, in symbolical terms, ‘the wheel has ceased to turn’, all that exists cannot but be in perfect simultaneity; succession is thus as it were transformed into simultaneity, and this can also be expressed by saying that ‘time has been changed into space’.[102] Thus a ‘reversal’ takes place at the last, to the disadvantage of time and to the advantage of space: at the very moment when time seemed on the point of finally devouring space, space in its turn absorbs time; and this, in terms of the cosmological meaning of the Biblical symbolism, can be said to be the final revenge of Abel on Cain.

  There is a sort of ‘prefiguration’ of the absorption of time by space, of which its authors are no doubt quite unconscious, in the recent physico-mathematical theories that treat the ‘space-time’ complex as a single and indivisible whole, these theories incidentally usually being interpreted inaccurately, when they are regarded as treating time as if it were a ‘fourth dimension’ of space. It would be more correct to say that time is treated as being comparable to a ‘fourth dimension’ only in the sense that in equations of movement it plays the part of a fourth coordinate added to the three representing the three dimensions of space; and it is important to note that this implies the geometrical representation of time in a rectilinear form, the insufficiency of which has previously been pointed out, though it could not be otherwise in theories so purely quantitative in character as those in question. But this last statement, while it corrects up to a certain point the ‘popular’ explanation, is nevertheless still inexact. In reality, that which plays the part of a fourth coordinate is not time, but something that the mathematicians call ‘imaginal time’;[103] and this expression, itself no more than a singularity of language arising from the use of an entirely ‘conventional’ notation, here takes on a rather unexpected significance. Indeed, to say that time must become ‘imaginal’ in order to become assimilable to a fourth dimension of space, is really and truly as much as to say that what must happen is that time should actually cease to exist as such, or in other words that the transmutation of time into space is in fact only realizable at the ‘end of the world’.[104]

  The conclusion may be drawn that it is quite useless to look for anything that might be a ‘fourth dimension’ of space under the conditions of the present world, and this has at least the advantage that it cuts short all the ‘neo-spiritualist’ divagations briefly referred to earlier; but is it necessary also to conclude that the absorption of time by space must necessarily take the form of the addition of a supplementary dimension to space, or is that too only a ‘figure of speech’? All that it is possible to say about this is that when the expansive tendency of space is no longer opposed and restrained by the compressive tendency of time, then space must naturally, in one way or another, undergo a dilatation such as will raise its indefinity to a higher power;[105] but it should scarcely be necessary to add that this occurrence cannot be represented by any image borrowed from the corporeal domain. Indeed, since time is one of the determining conditions of corporeal existence, it is evident that its suppression is by itself sufficient to cause everything to be taken right out of the world; the being is then in what has been called elsewhere an extracorporeal ‘prolongation’ of the same individual state of existence as th
at of which the corporeal world represents but a mere modality: this also serves to indicate that the end of the corporeal world is by no means the end of the said state of existence considered in its integrality. Furthermore, the end of a cycle such as that of the present humanity is really only the end of the corporeal world itself in quite a relative sense, and only in relation to the possibilities that have been included in the cycle and so have completed their development in corporeal mode; but in reality the corporeal world is not annihilated, but ‘transmuted’, and it immediately receives a new existence, because, beyond the ‘stopping-point’ corresponding to the unique instant at which time is no more, ‘the wheel begins to turn again for the accomplishment of another cycle’.

  Another important consequence arising from these considerations is that the end of the cycle as well as its beginning is ‘intemporal’, and this is necessarily so because of the strict analogical correspondence existing between the two extreme points; thus it comes about that the end is in fact the restoration of the ‘primordial state for the humanity of the cycle in question’, and this also makes clear the symbolical relation of the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’ to the ‘Terrestrial Paradise’. It is also a return to the ‘center of the world’, the exterior manifestation of the center taking the forms, at either end of the cycle, of the ‘Terrestrial Paradise’ and the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’ respectively, with the ‘axial’ tree growing in the middle of both the one and the other. During the whole interval between the two, that is, during the course of the cycle, the center is however hidden, becoming indeed more and more so, because humanity has moved gradually away from it, and this is fundamentally the real meaning of the ‘fall’. The conception of a movement away from the center is only another way of representing the descending course of the cycle, for the center of a state such as ours, being the point of direct communication with superior states, is at the same time the essential pole of existence for that state; a movement from essence toward substance is thus a movement from the center toward the circumference, from the interior toward the exterior, and also, as is clearly shown in this case by the geometrical representation, from unity toward multiplicity.[106]

  The Pardes, inasmuch as it is the ‘center of the world’, is, according to the primary meaning of its Sanskrit equivalent paradesha, the ‘supreme region’, but it is also, according to a secondary meaning of the same word, the ‘distant region’, ever since it has become, in the course of cyclical development, actually inaccessible to ordinary humanity. It is in fact, at least apparently, the most distant of all things, being situated at the ‘end of the world’ both in the spatial sense (the summit of the mountain of the ‘Terrestrial Paradise’ touching the lunar sphere) and in the temporal sense (the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’ descending to the earth at the end of the cycle); nevertheless, it is always in reality the nearest of all things, since it has never ceased to be at the center of all things,[107] and this brings out the inversion of relationship between the ‘exterior’ and ‘interior’ points of view. Only, in order that this proximity may be actually realized, the temporal condition must necessarily be suppressed, because it is the unfolding of time in conformity with the laws of manifestation that has brought about the apparent separation from the center, and also because time, according to the very definition of succession, cannot turn back on its course; release from the temporal condition is always possible for certain beings in particular, but as far as humanity (or more exactly a humanity) taken in its entirety is concerned, a release from time obviously implies that the said humanity has passed completely through the cycle of its corporeal manifestation: only then can it, together with the whole of the terrestrial environment that depends on it and participates in the same cyclic movement, be really reintegrated into the ‘primordial state’, or, what is the same thing, into the ‘center of the world’. This center is where ‘time is changed into space’, because it is where the direct reflection in our state of existence of the principial eternity is found, and thereby all succession is excluded: moreover death cannot attain thereto, so that it is also the very ‘seat of immortality’;[108] all things appear therein in perfect simultaneity in a changeless present, through the power of the ‘third eye’ with which man has recovered the ‘sense of eternity’.[109]

  24

  Toward Dissolution

  Having given some attention to the end of the cycle, it is now necessary as it were to turn back again, in order to examine more fully the causes that can, under the conditions of the present period, play an effective part in leading humanity and the world toward that end. Two contributing tendencies may be distinguished, and their description involves the use of terms suggesting an apparent antinomy: on one side is the tendency toward what has been called the ‘solidification’ of the world, and it is this that has been mainly considered so far, and on the other side is the tendency toward the dissolution of the world, and it remains to examine in detail the action of the latter, for it must not be forgotten that every such end necessarily takes one form and one only, that of a dissolution of the manifested as such. Let it be said at once that the second of the two tendencies now seems to be beginning to predominate; for, in the first place, materialism properly so called, corresponding as it clearly does to ‘solidification’ in its grossest form (the word ‘petrifaction’ could almost be used, by analogy with what minerals represent in this connection), has already lost much ground, at least in the domain of scientific and philosophical theory, if not yet in that of the common mentality; and this is so far true that, as pointed out earlier, the very notion of ‘matter’ as it existed in these theories has begun to fade away and to dissolve. In the second place, and correlatively to this change, the illusion of security that held sway at the time when materialism had attained its greatest influence, and that was then more or less inseparable from the prevailing idea of ‘ordinary life’, has in the main been dissipated by the events that have taken place and the speed of their succession, so much so that the dominant impression today is very different, for it has become an impression of instability extending to all domains. Since ‘solidity’ necessarily implies stability, this again shows clearly that the point of greatest effective ‘solidity’ within the possibilities of our world has not only been reached, but has also already been passed, and consequently that dissolution is the goal toward which the world will be traveling henceforth.

  The acceleration of time itself, as it becomes ever more pronounced and causes changes to be ever more rapid, seems to lead of its own accord toward dissolution, but it cannot for that reason be said that the general direction of events has been modified, for the cyclical movement inevitably continues to follow the same descending course. Moreover, the physical theories just referred to, while they too change with growing rapidity like everything else, continue nonetheless to take on a more and more exclusively quantitative character, to such a point that their character has now become assimilated to that of purely mathematical theories, and this change, as previously indicated, takes them yet further away from the sensible reality that they claim to explain, and leads them into a domain that is necessarily situated on a lower plane than that of sensible reality, as was explained earlier when pure quantity was under consideration. In any case, the ‘solid’, even at its greatest conceivable density and impenetrability, by no means corresponds to pure quantity, having always at least a minimum of qualitative elements; it is moreover corporeal by definition, and is even in a sense the most corporeal thing possible; now ‘corporeality’ is by definition such that space, however ‘compressed’ it may be under the conditions appertaining to a ‘solid’, is necessarily inherent in its constitution, and space, let it be recalled again, can in no way be assimilated to pure quantity. Even if the point of view of modern science were to be adopted momentarily, so that on the one hand ‘corporeality’ could be reduced to extension in accordance with Descartes’ ideas, and on the other hand space could be regarded as nothing but a mere mode of quantity, the difficulty s
till remaining would be that everything would be still be in the domain of continuous quantity; a change to the domain of discontinuous quantity, that is, of number, which alone can be looked upon as representing pure quantity, must then obviously imply, by reason of the said discontinuity alone, that neither the ‘solid’, nor anything else that is corporeal, can subsequently be taken into account.