Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  A literary man, in the time of the Leviathan, was similarly ignorant of the fact that the subject is unimportant and that the interior rhythm alone marks the vale of a writer, whether of verse or prose. Versification was mistaken for poetry and anecdote for prose; the interior music of style had been killed.

  Painters and sculptors, wishing to be free of a traditional craftsmanship that had once permitted 15-year-old pupils to collaborate in the works of their masters, became bogged down in lamentable material difficulties and labored in matter, under the thumb of nature, without ever attaining the secondary, superior nature that is art. The portrait stylizing a human being was forbidden to them; their lesser decorative art treated gods, tables and basins identically. There were no longer anything but journeymen molders copying material contours. The interior music of lines and harmony of style had been killed there too.

  Accidents of happenstance were grasped, fugitive impressions; gross caricatures, inspired by the sensations of the moment, replaced the eternal types dreamed by the artists of antiquity. The Leviathan knew only accidental juxtapositions of matter, it did not know the formidable universal consciousness that unites all the arts in the same style, which permits a Beethoven to awaken philosophical ideas and a Gluck architectural splendors.

  XIII. The Theater of the Leviathan

  At the beginning of the 20th century, it was in the theater, above all, that it would have been easy to observe the progress realized by the Leviathan. Indeed, the theater, better than any other mode of expression, permitted the formation of a clear idea of communal aspirations and the liberation of average morality. Like the orator, it did not address itself to an individual, but to a crowd. Furthermore, the theater was never more honored than during this period of transition. It seemed that men were now incapable of feeling an individual artistic pleasure and that art was no longer anything to them but a collective hallucination.

  I have already observed how profoundly the new social morality of that era differed from the old individual morality. It was no longer inside himself, in the depths of his conscience, that a man now sought reasons for action, but outside, in social necessity. There gradually resulted, in consequence, a sort of fatalism, of submission, which bent the masses to the omnipotent will of the Leviathan.

  The theater offered an exact expression of this transformation. When an author undertook, in his play, to develop characters, he did not interest the audience at all; he even made them indignant when his internal ideas seemed dangerous and hazardous to the coherency of the social body. A deceived husband killing his wife became inadmissible; a playwright, criticizing the morals of his time, was seen as an insupportable misanthrope whose divagations could scarcely be tolerated. Even the classical glorification of physical individuality was inadmissible; any manifestation of esthetic beauty, any exhibition of nudity in the theater, seemed unfitting or out of place. It was not that personal morals were more corrupt in that era than in any other, but that did not interest the Leviathan, and it was solely in the name of the social body that people protested against the public honoring of the human body.

  With the progress of science and the leveling of ideas, all discussion now seemed futile; conversations in salons no longer existed, private correspondence did not interest anyone, and the editorial content of the great newspapers, instead of revealing personal opinions, was nothing but base demagogic flattery, further debasing the most abject and most ridiculous instincts of the masses.

  In the theater, the dialogue that would once have painted the internal evolution of a thought was soon replaced by material representation determining situations by external social signs: by means of furniture, décor, the wealth or otherwise of the characters. This is what explains the incredible success, in that era, of mute cinematography, which sufficiently satisfied the majority of the public by means of its material indications. The determinist theater was pushed, in that era, to its extreme limits; it was considered adequate, in some plays, to indicate the characters’ states of minds by movements in a crowd, external noises, the distant whistle of a railway train or the color of the scene’s lighting. Modern décor indicating milieu replaced antique masks indicating character. Given the equality of all human cells before the omnipotence of the Leviathan, it was understood, in fact, that the same external causes would determine the same sentiments in all the characters and symbolize them.

  This forced equality was, moreover, found in the same era in all the social institutions that had prepared the way for the advent of the Leviathan and had permitted that monstrous being to develop in all liberty. Universal suffrage in political matters, equality of birth—which was to realize, a few years later, the suppression of inheritance—and many other things concurred in giving the Leviathan the equal and homogenous elements that it needed for its formation.

  It was for that same reason that it was not always understood, in that era, what the deeper significance was of the so-called workers’ movements that were developing irresistibly. Many artists and thinkers were offended, in their most intimate convictions, as they observed that people did not hesitate to sacrifice themselves, on every occasion, to the most vulgar personalities. More than that, excellent workmen no longer understood the orders they received from their syndicates, enjoining them to lower the standard of their work to that of their least capable companions. Neither party, adopting the old individualist point of view, could understand that this homogenous equality was indispensable to the cellular formation of the Leviathan.

  Assured in the present, that equality had also to extend into the future; the uncertainty as to what the next day would bring that reigned after the War only served to prepare the state of mind that had to be engendered. People soon adopted the habit of living from day to day, without worrying about the future; thrift was no longer anything but a memory, money was spent as it came in; knowing that its value was subject to variation, no one any longer built with future centuries in mind, but according to the needs of the moment.

  In politics, the situation was graver still. A Republican of 1789 worked for all of humankind; a Republican of 1923 did not any longer work for his country, for his party, or even for his electoral interests, but for himself, furtively and day by day. Laws, all the beauty of which had formerly been in their generality and their permanence, were no longer voted for any but particular cases, according to the needs or the appetites of the few, and no one was liable, on that basis, to embark upon any long-term commerce or industry. Only courtiers and intermediaries were able to bring off coups, making rapid fortunes, living as parasites on the labor of others, without creating anything but ruins. In that era, it was not immediately understood why the prestige of statesmen and governments was diminishing every day; it was because in reality, they too were no longer leaders but simple cells functionally differentiated within a single homogeneous organism.

  Dramatic production, which always reflects the mores of a time exactly, followed this general movement. Care was not longer taken, as before, to construct a play exposing a general idea or describing an eternal human character; successions of amusing little scenes were written, each one in the moment when it was played but without any necessary connection, without any notion of wholeness. They were written for a particular theater, a particular public, a particular interpretation, a particular season, for the fashionably nuances of the day. Success was desired at a determined moment and no one, in that time of relativity, any longer thought of immortality, as had once been the case.

  Alongside the theater proper, a no less valuable indication was offered, in that epoch, by the characteristic evolution of music. Instead of an individual piece of music or the personal artistry of a singer alone on stage, praise was initially lavished on a symphony orchestra or a voice that only played the role of a secondary instrument. Then the sung theme, the last vestige of humanity, progressively disappeared. In the same way that, in the solar spectrum, beyond the colored rays visible to the eyes, there are ultra-violet rays
whose presence can be indirectly observed, there was in music, as in dramatic composition, a sort of symphony superior to human expression, inaccessible directly, whose existence was well established scientifically, but which could not be defined in direct, exact and purely sensual terms. There was a sort of social harmony no longer corresponding to individual rhythm, dominating and enveloping man, a new scientific “Marseillaise” devoid of charm, inspiration and harmony but harmonically precise according to the laws of acoustics, which properly belonged—as was only understood much later—to the colossal Leviathan, which was gradually developing its formidable and complex framework.

  XIV. The Rejuvenation of Cells

  I have tried to explain in the preceding chapters how the development of scientific ideas had progressively prepared the way for the Earthly manifestation of the Leviathan.

  Deprived of all internal principles, having rejected all belief in an eternal and immutable substance, men no longer admitted anything but the most absolute determinism by way of moral regulation. If human ideas really only depended on external combinations, if thought really were no more than the result of purely material encounters, it was ridiculous any longer to admit free will and individual responsibility. Every action accomplished by a man being determined by innumerable causes over which he had no control, it became just as absurd to accuse him as to consider that he knew his own mind. Good and evil actions were no longer distinguishable; they were no more than simple phenomena, essentially similar: facts that the scientists ought to observe and record with neither affection nor anger.

  It became evident, on the other hand, that the only true value on Earth could only be a material value—which is to say, a force. The stronger a man was, the more violently he acted, as a living cell, according to his instincts or desires, the more he would pass for a perfect man. That was, in sum, the justification of all actions previously considered immoral, the facile excuse for all laxity, and the certain discredit of any bravery or virtuous action. The best-equipped man was nothing, properly understood, but the plaything of his destiny; one should certainly not admire him for his powerful actions, since he was not their true author, but one ought to fear, respect and obey him, as one obeys, without any possible discussion, an irresistible natural force.

  It was understood that a focal point was necessary in such conditions, and the idea was joyfully welcomed of a material grouping capable of codifying nascent anarchy and replacing the vanished principles with a scientific organism modeled on the natural organism of the marine hydra. With the Leviathan, the metaphysical principles of old, conclusively rejected by science, were still driven out, but an organism was nevertheless obtained that was seemingly capable of taking their place.

  Perhaps, however, the Leviathan would never have developed completely if a new scientific discovery—that of perpetual rejuvenation—had not provided definitive permission. Without being aware of it, and even though they had rejected forever the moral principles of times past, men instinctively followed the same customs as before, quite simply because they lived, in the final analysis, in the same fashion as their ancestors.

  Whatever progress science had made in the rapidity of instruction and the more perfect organization of life, it remained no less true that men were born as they always had been, passed through a naïve and enthusiastic period of infancy, and then the reflections of maturity, to finish up in the authoritarianism of old age. And inevitably, as in the good old days, they observed that their ideas were modified by experience, and that high positions and authority came with age. As before, it was in the hands of the oldest that cunning—which is to say, power—lay, and, quite naturally, still as before, social ideas were instinctively inspired by the development of human life. Old men, with the best will in the world, continued discrediting the ideas of youth and praising those that were compatible with the decline of life, classifying passions and ideas in accordance with the age in which they are experienced rather than according to their intrinsic value. It was for this reason that love had been rapidly discredited by Government legislators, as it had been disdained by the sages of old. Only artificial procedures of reproduction were honored; the disabused studies and sad, inconsequential researches of maturity were reputed, as in the time of the ancient philosophers, the most elevated achievement of humanity entire.

  All desire for immortality had been suppressed, all future constructions for the family or the race; humankind had been robbed of all belief in tomorrow, but it had not been possible to prevent human life from reproducing in miniature, by the stages of its evolution, the life of a nation, thus ensuring that human cells would remain identical in time, as in space, for the sake of the Leviathan’s good health.

  Suddenly, the sensational discovery of the rejuvenation of cells arrived to modify the ancient morality even more profoundly than years of materialist philosophy and science had been able to do.

  To begin with, the Government legislators affected to treat this discovery as a simple laboratory game. Obviously, it pleased them to think that their old age or their maturity might henceforth be prolonged indefinitely at their discretion, and that they would thus almost certainly escape dreaded death. They therefore limited themselves, at first, to taking advantage of the new discovery by maintaining themselves as they were. Then, little by little, sure signs of rejuvenation were observed in the faces of each and every one of them.

  An old man, who had still been wrinkled beneath his white hair a few months earlier, returned after a short absence with graying hair and a young face. He excused himself with a smile, saying that he had perhaps overdone the treatment without being aware of it, and stoutly renounced all juvenile ambition. Nothing, in fact, was worth more than maturity, each one of them declared—and, as rejuvenation exercised its influence on their character, it was understood that no one, among the government personnel, was prepared to exchange his morose gravity for the infantile joys of youth.

  In spite of all these declarations, one could not fail to observe, after a few years, that the oldest legislators in the Council of Ministers, as a result of their successive transformations, no longer looked any older than 18 or 20. It was not long before the effects of this transformation were felt in the deliberations of the Government.

  Needless to say, this transformation, so rapid among the greatest legislators, was even more prompt among the public. In a few months, the entire population had become definitively young, enthusiastic and joyful again—and you can hardly imagine, even approximately, the profound change that was then produced in mores.

  The determinist theories being indisputable, people continued, as before, to take them for their guide—but the veritable danger that might be presented by theories of violence, youth and strength was perceived for the first time when they were applied by young men who were veritably young and strong. So long as they had only been professed by morose philosophers, they had not had any real influence on mores; they were bitter fancies of old men and their effects remained purely theoretical, since those same old men simultaneously extolled the authority of the most aged and the irreducible supremacy of experience.

  It was only in the presence of that childish populace, that the terrible practical consequences these ideas might have were understood. Thanks to the facile excuse of determinism, all acts of violence, all infamies and all crimes came to be not merely acceptable but—which was far more important—materially perpetrated. For the first time in the history of the world, the ancient morality slumbering in the depths of men was definitively attained and the gravest disturbances would have been threatened if that childish populace had not, in its insouciance, fortunately set aside the methods of rejuvenation and welcomed, as a deliverance, the nascent empire of the Leviathan, which brought a measure of order into the chaos.

  It was admitted then that it was absurd to want to mobilize the human cells at the same invariable age, and that a certain evolution was necessary between birth and death. To halt the course of life, not to g
row old, was, according to all evidence, not to augment human activity but, quite to the contrary, to rob man of all motive for action and to plunge him into despair by forbidding him the essential characteristic of life that is change. Change is nothing, in fact, but the endless course of desire. Desire disappears when it is realized and eternal youth was only, in sum, a total realization, just like death: a conclusive arrest of material life.

  Perpetual youth was henceforth the sole prerogative of the Leviathan whose cells were indefinitely renewed—and that was the beginning of its ruin, for it became, at that point, a material three-dimensional being avoiding evolution, which is to say, life.

  Without the sense of the fourth dimension which prolongs him in the past and the future—to employ the language of three dimensions—man would be, in fact, nothing but a material three-dimensional being, without arbitrary freedom, without will, without the power of decision, always submissive, in the present moment, to the same actions in the same circumstances, like a falling stone or a reflected ray of light.

  Without the awareness of the future and the past—which is to say, of progress and tradition—completing the present sensation of three dimensions, in a word, without the awareness of the fourth dimension, placing the mind outside time and space, man would not be superior to a pebble. He would be no more than a soulless body—and that soulless body was that of the Leviathan.

  XV. The Century of the Soulless Body

  The most curious aspect of the extraordinary development of the Leviathan at the beginning of the 20th century was, as I have said, the universal and unconscious consent of the human cells that served the monstrous animal as fodder.