by Rene Daumal
I put them to my eyes and, indeed, at the far end of the gallery, saw the Omniscienter. There he was, an enormous cranial dome with a tiny, shapeless, crumpled face, which seemed to me to be hanging by the ears from the two ebony knobs on the back of a raised throne. Swinging to and fro beneath this head was a little cloth puppet which dangled its empty trouser legs over the crimson plush seat, His tiny right arm was kept aloft by means of a wire, and the index finger rested on his temple in the gesture of one who knows. Above the throne ran a banner bearing this inscription:
I KNOW EVERYTHING, BUT I DON’T UNDERSTAND ANY OF IT
Struck with respect and dread, I put the binoculars down quickly and asked the Professor:
“But what about the man? What happens to him after he is examined?”
“The man, as happened with the red rabbit just now, is inevitably, in the process, left to fester in a dustbin.”
28
“All things considered,” I remarked to Professor Mumu, “these Scienters you have shown me are not very different from what we in our language call scientists.”
He looked pityingly at me and replied very much to the point:
“Young man, it’s just the opposite: you should not rely so much on appearances. The scientist does useful work. Out of all his hypotheses, which he has verified experimentally, he retains only those which may be of service to himself or others. The Scienter, on the contrary, seeks pure truth, as he says; that is, truth which does not have to be lived. It matters not to him if, when he makes a discovery, others apply it for making poisonous gases or curing disease or transmitting intellectual corruption or educating the young. That’s the first difference. Here’s another. The scientist believes only what he has tested experimentally and asserts with confidence only what he can require others to test by experiment. But the Scienter applies the experimental method exclusively to material objects. A few Scienters may claim to make experimental studies of thought; but since their experimenting is limited to rulers and scales, all they catch in their instruments is the refuse and material traces of thought—words, gestures, products of the mind, and stirrings in the entrails. What they call thought is the image of a knitted brow and eyes screwed up; the will is a clenched jaw and a fist striking a table; emotion, a certain irregularity in the workings of the heart and lungs. Third, the true scientist always subordinates knowledge to knowing and maintains that the first object to be known is always the closest at hand, the most accessible from every approach, and the most consistently actual; the Scienter, on the contrary, starts with what is furthest from him, be it an atom or a star, a number or an abstract form, and never crosses the line separating other people from himself. Indeed, the Scienter draws back as much as he can and does so with pride, taking second place to what is far off. He taxes the scientist with vaingloriousness and accuses him of thinking he is at the center of everything. He believes with blind faith, and he encourages young people in schools to learn that each man is a small heap of colloids swept up by a flabby globe into a vortex whose center itself spins on an imaginary point, which moves through the curved boundlessness of relative space. The Scienter is all the more pleased when he decenters himself and decenters others even more.
“In other words, the scientist measures all things by the fixed standard he carries within him, whereas the Scienter measures things by other things; and of course it is because things are not to be measured against each other that he is forced, in his search for a measure that is common to all, to saw-’em-in-two (hence his name), to chop them into infinitesimal fragments.
“You see now just how far from the mark you were.”
29
He was obviously right, and I began wondering whether the orderly had not been mistaken and Professor Mumu was not really a healthy man. To put my mind at ease, I put a question to him:
“Professor, you have taught me a great deal. But I would be grateful if you could quote me one example of a scientist in the sense that you understand the term.”
“I know of one contemporary instance,” he replied. “I mean myself. However, I have come up with a serum that will cure all Scienters. I won’t say they’ll all become scientists, but I shall not rest until I have exterminated the very last microbe of Scientry.”
I had my answer. The orderly had told me no lies. But intrigued, I asked:
“So it’s a microbic disease?”
“Yes, and the microbe has been around for a long time. The protozoa swarmed even on the tree of knowledge. It passed into the blood of our first fathers along with original sin. To preserve us against this microbe, we have but one radical remedy: the sap of the tree of life. Adam wouldn’t have anything to do with it: ‘I’ll not be had twice,’ he said. But how could we get hold of it? It was only after ten years’ research that it came to me. The serum I had been looking for has really existed since time immemorial; specialists have been making it daily, and it would be quite possible, whenever you wished, to produce it in industrial quantities at practically no cost at all. I suppose you’ve already guessed to what banal liquid I refer?”
I thought: “Does he mean wine? But if he means wine, he can’t be ill! Yet I haven’t seen him drink any so far, and all things considered it’s best to be on the safe side; even if he thinks you’re an idiot, you must not pronounce so dangerous a word.” So I assumed an inquiring look, and the Professor announced with triumphant pity:
“Holy water, young man, holy water! Nowadays it is manufactured by means of electrical charges in laboratories which, if you wish, I shall show you in a moment. Holy water injected intravenously cures the most gravely infected Scienter in a matter of weeks. It reconciles science with faith. For the most suitable cases, we adopt the following procedure. With the first inoculation, the Scienter concedes that the miracles of Lourdes are real. After the second, the Holy Virgin appears to him. With the third, he recognizes the infallibility of the Pope. By the fourth, he is going to confession and mass. By the fifth, hope speaks within him: ‘Thou shalt live in Paradise.’ By the sixth, charity speaks within him: ‘Inoculate others as you yourself have been inoculated.’ By the seventh, faith speaks within him: ‘Seek no more to understand.’ At this point, I claim that he is cured. Unfortunately, the Authorities, who still live in the shadow of crude materialistic superstitions, are reluctant to acknowledge the effectiveness of my cure and though they heap attentions and honors upon those whom I’ve successfully treated, they keep them locked up here. It is true that the cured have no wish to leave. They prefer to remain and help with the work of healing their brothers and sisters and a few have become fabricators of holy water, healers healing, holy men making whole men.
“I have also cured other classes of sick persons. As a result, numerous composers of useless utterances, forsaking their sterile occupations, have put their talents at the disposal of their equals and betters. Some sing the praises of holy water, others glorify their race or nation or exalt the virtues of the soldier, the unsung heroism of the policeman, the abnegation of the missionary, the spirit of enterprise of the business man, the power of resignation, and the joy of possessing nothing.
“But most of all, you must see what they have done, under my direction, for the education of the young.”
30
“So you do have schools, then?” I asked.
“But of course. There are men and women here. They form couples. Children are born. They must be protected against the contamination to which their heredity all too often exposes them. Nowadays, most children are sprinkled with holy water virtually at birth and this simple precaution is sometimes enough to give them immunity. But we don’t leave it at that. We have completely overhauled the old teaching structures. Four teams of instructors are responsible for, respectively, physical education, artistic education, scientific education and religious education. The first of these teams has restored the body to its place of rightful importance. One quarter of each child’s day is in actual fact given over to the study of gymna
stic manuals, handbooks on every sport, and the lives of great champions, all written in mnemonic verse and copiously illustrated. In this way, quite without effort or time wasting, even the sickliest child gets to know all that there is to know about physical culture in the space of two years.
“We have introduced the same reforms in the other areas I mentioned. Thanks to cinema, the phonograph, museums, and most especially, to picture books, our school children take no time at all to learn everything about art without ever having to create anything, everything about science without having to think, everything about religion without having to live. But even had we not had the inventions of modern science at our disposal, the printed book would have been enough in itself to wreak this miracle.”
“Yes,” I broke in (for I could not tell when he would stop talking), “absolutely, Philippe L. said the same thing to me yesterday: ‘What do you look for in a book? A pocket tutor: all the advantages of a teacher with none of the disadvantages.’”
“You’ve caught my drift exactly,” said the old bore.
And he proceeded to tell me at length about some long tome of which he was the proud author, on The Evils of Psittacism, which every schoolboy was required to learn by heart.
31
I managed to get away by making some trivial excuse. As long as I had a guide such as he, always talking and explaining, I would see nothing for myself. I desired to observe the Sophers in peace: and indeed, I was able to remain amongst them for quite some time, learning their language and conversing with the most eminent of them.
I know you’ll say that all this business about explorations, new worlds, and adventures, occurring in the confines of a garret and in the space of a few hours, is rather implausible. Agreed. But after a long evening spent carousing and thirsty, anything is possible. And anyway, so what? I have been speaking to you for barely two hours. A ten-year tale may be told in ten minutes. A ten-minute telling can be a moment’s thought. A Racine tragedy spans twenty-four hours, which can occupy one hour’s reading, and this can sometimes shrink to no more than a whimper. I would have liked to say it all in a couple of sentences. But I cannot do it, and I shall acknowledge your patience by being as brief as possible.
My orderly had advised me not to leave the area given over to the Scienters without paying a call on their Purificators of Accounts. “But watch out for them, they are intellectual sirens!” he had told me, and the warning was certainly not unnecessary. The function of these almost superhuman beings is to collect from each Scienter the results of his researches and to purge them of all tangible matter so as to reduce them to numbers, figures, and pure thought processes; then, through simplification, elimination, reconstruction, transposition, and reasoning, they formulate adamantine laws to which the Scienters will defer with humility and gratitude. They speak a marvelous language so designed that fallacy and imprecision cannot be expressed: this enables them, once they have found a particular truth, to state it and from it to draw its consequences without having to think any further.
Thus far there is nothing to differentiate them from those beings, human in form and, you might say, divine in intellect, whom we honor with the name of mathematicians. But the Purificators of Accounts are no more proper mathematicians than the Scienters are proper scientists. They attract attention in the first instance with their extraordinary ability to talk for hours on end in a state of evident rapture without showing the least sign of fatigue, never saying anything, never speaking of any thing, but always with such logical rigor and ease that it is extremely difficult for even the most sluggish brain to resist falling under the spell of their crystalline language.
But where they really differ from mathematicians is that they regard their duties as Purificators of Accounts and Legislators of Language as vile and servile functions, which must be discharged quickly when they cannot be avoided, and which must always come second to a task that they say is altogether more noble and disinterested. Adapting a saying of one of our contemporaries, they have taken as their motto: “We wish to speak of nothing.” Their philosopher’s stone, their squared circle, which they never attain but which rules all their questing, is the perfect System, which would apply to no human experience and remain eminently unusable. But this goal, like all disinterested goals, recedes before them with each step they take to draw nearer to it: they might invent numbers which cannot be expressed, spaces shaped like espaliers or corkscrews, geometries with any number of variable dimensions, stretches of nothing with holes and bumps in it, or discontinuous essences, but there is always sooner or later a Scienter who discovers that their arbitrary constructs are perfectly accurate expressions of as yet unexplained phenomena of the physical world. For Mathematics and Poetry share a common capacity for preserving their power incorruptibly even when they are articulated in the mouth of the man who knows them not; when this occurs, they think themselves into being through him, and he is then no more than a man possessed, a maniac, a sacred madman, as Socrates called the poet in the Ion.
I almost allowed myself, as I’ve said, to be beguiled by these intellectual sirens and by one in particular, a young man of great nimbleness of mind and a body made almost transparent by the neglect in which its occupier normally left it. Here are the outlines of the theory which he had conceived:
“If the science of mathematics has failed utterly to detach itself from the tangible world, it is because it has failed to pursue to the utmost the consequences of Einstein’s great remark (or was it Hegel?) that the object known is modified by the act of knowing. Any mathematical system must therefore combine not only space, with its three non-orientated dimensions, and time, with its single direction, but also consciousness, with its two opposing directions: being and not-being or, if you prefer, consciousness and unconsciousness, or again, creation and machine; and so it is in a three-dimensional, three-directional continuum that the tangible world must be inscribed so that it is reduced to nothing by the dissolving power of abstraction.
“The first task was to give a numerical form to the two directions of consciousness. Now there are—and why did no one think of it sooner?—two series of whole numbers. The mechanical series, which is repetitive or additive, obtained by repeated addition of the unit: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …; this series may be produced without thought—by an adding machine, for instance. And second, the constructive series of numbers, intermultiplication of which produces all others, and which cannot themselves be produced by multiplication; all these numbers are absolutely pristine, unforeseeable facts, and they are quite rightly called ‘prime numbers.’ This series, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 …, can only be produced by an act of thought; no machine will ever provide an indefinite series of prime numbers.
Thus it is within a system of rectangle co-ordinates in which the abscissae are the series of whole numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … (the mechanical series), and the ordinates are the series of prime numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 … (the creative series), that the activity of consciousness will be traced in the curves of its variations. These curves, in turn, will combine with the other co-ordinates of our continuum and will describe the true shape of phenomena as it emerges from the reciprocal action of knowing and known.”
The logic was impeccable, and had I been content to listen with the ears of intellect, I would have surely been beguiled forever by the siren’s speech. But, remembering the companions of Ulysses, I stuffed those ears with thick plugs of common sense, and, listening with another ear—my trusty ear, my only good ear—I heard only the hum of silence. This so-called mathematician did not think: not even as he recited the series of prime numbers which he knew by heart up to 101. (But is “by heart” the right expression? Oh, no matter, the words are too firmly rooted in common usage.)
32
Between the laboratories of the Scienters and the retreats of the Sophers, unclassifiable Clarificators, rejected by each group in turn, come and go. They flatter the Scienters by brandishing ruler and scales and the Sophers by displaying scorn for the
immediate and the near at hand. Certain among them, whom Professor Mumu had told me about, grace themselves with the title of Psychographers; the word comes from psyche, a sort of large pivoting mirror which they use to observe without being seen. The pocket dictionary which the orderly had left for me defined “psychography” as the “science of the residue of other people’s thoughts,” and “thought” as “all that in Man, which has yet to be weighed, counted, and measured.” So, in order to gain the favor of the Scienters, the Psychographers seek out traces of “thought” wherever thought is most wanting: in children, in madmen, and even in animals. The normal adult human being scarcely holds any interest for them, because to know a human being, you must first create one, and also because they wish to remain “pure speculators.”
The same is true of the Politologists and the Anthropographers who, in the tranquillity of their chambers, through the accounts of explorers, missionaries, and historians, study distant or dead societies: the Papuans, Iroquois, Aruntas, Hittites, Arcadians, the Archeo-Swiss, Sumerians, Hottentots, Proto-Belgians, or others besides. They scarcely speak of the society in which they live; they either put up with it or turn it to their own advantage, for “otherwise,” they say, “we would become politicians.” They do not concern themselves about normal adult human society because to know it, you must first create it, and also because “pure truth” alone interests them.
