Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  Something more serious happened that had hastened the birth of the Leviathan. By virtue of repudiating the existence of an internal consciousness, men—who could not, of course, do without it—took it into their heads to project it externally, to fabricate a fetishistic and social conscience. In the same way that, in the natural life of the body, certain reflex, habitual and commonplace actions no longer require the intervention of the brain, in the new social body of the Leviathan, a series of commonplaces, customary necessities and arbitrary principles formed something like a vast exterior consciousness: a monstrous bulb that was the caricatural consciousness of the Leviathan.

  As in the times of primitive religions, men surrendered a part of their responsibility in favor of supernatural rules, social superstitions and reputed inevitable necessities: pretended fatalities of the race, which they decorated pompously with the name of natural laws. Logically, instinct resumed its primacy. Instead of governing themselves, men imagined that they were governed by external laws, and with the progress of naturalism they unknowingly favored the monstrous and abnormal development of the State, then of the Leviathan.

  It was then that the inevitable movement of Platonic reaction came to light.

  So perilous did the enterprise seem that it was in a conciliatory and ironic form that it first presented itself, and those were the beginnings of humor, unknown until then in the world, born of the abnormal development of 19th century Science. Humorists, irreducible individualists, pretended at first to be prodigiously interested in the conquests of science—and, in fact, set about studying them carefully, impeccable analysis being the preliminary condition of any good synthesis. Their rigorousness in the application of rules was that of jurists and sportsmen.

  Humorists, therefore, studied nature; they pretended to be more naturalistic than the naturalists, more enamored of discoveries than the scientists themselves; in a few steps, they attained the extreme limits of scientific reasoning and then they pretended not to perceive that it had limits; they continued their analyses and deductions in the void, thus demonstrating, by means of absurdity, what the limits of science were. Up to that point, they had only employed the Socratic method; they had been content to treat injury with injury, in the manner of homeopaths. Soon, when they felt stronger, they resolutely resumed the path of synthesis and, empowered by their acquired science, were now able to produce the art-work of which they dreamed. Only then was the total seriousness of their campaign understood, and the full scope of their pretended buffoonery.

  XVIII. The Revolt of the Apes

  Had the humorists been content to demonstrate by means of absurdity the limits of three-dimensional pseudocertainties, their seemingly negative work would have been inconsequential.

  When, on the other hand, they set out to demonstrate that, beyond these limits, something else must exist, and that doubt and negation represented, in the final analysis, positive realities completing the notion of the universe, certain minds began to understand the profound meaning of the fourth dimension.

  At that moment, a few individual revolts became observable which, in the name of symbolism, broke away brutally from external naturalism and tried to adopt a purely subjective vision of the universe.

  To tell the truth, the symbolists were only unconsciously copying in the subjective what the naturalists had done in the objective. Imposing the form of their mind on the World as the materialists were imposing the form of the World on their minds, they were likewise men of the moment, repudiating all tradition, similarly ignorant of that humanism that unites all minds, outside time and space, in the superior world of a universal consciousness—but while the materialist, photographing the external three-dimensional world, had some chance of moving other men by presenting them with familiar objects, the symbolist, by contrast, photographing his fugitive constructions of the three-dimensional world, presented images that were not merely incomprehensible to other men but very often incomprehensible to the new person that he became himself a moment later. It was because idealist, as well as materialist, endeavors were always conceived in three dimensions in the time of the Leviathan, that they were sterile, and powerless to reveal the great mysteries of the human soul.

  Humor alone, by contrast, was to open the great highway that was to lead a few millennia later to the Great Idealist Renaissance, in the Age of the Golden Eagle, when, the fourth dimension being familiar to all men, love replaced the lie that could not admit a communal consciousness.

  Humor in its conscious form, was born, as we have said, as a reaction against the absurd vanity of three-dimensional scientific “certainties.” It was not sufficient, in fact, to have decreed the suppression of the soul for it to cease to exist, to think and—as always—to submit the relativity of three-dimensional phenomena to the perpetual control and contradictory criticism of the immobile, eternal and continuous four-dimensional consciousness. Humor was, in this sense, a sort of intellectual safety-valve, and the materialists of that era, who pursued their sarcasms and their anti-clerical hatred of obsolete and outdated religions, proscribing mystics, ideologues and poets, did not understand for a moment that humor was their sole adversary, reborn in a new form—but prudently masked with buffoonery, in order to be able to say anything without hazard, like the fools of old. Certain more subtle minds successfully divined that humor hid something, but thought that it was a timidity of the heart; they saw nothing in it but a psychological accident and did not glimpse the reality of a new world in the sallies it made, in the manner of an adolescent Christopher Columbus.

  And yet that humor, which—this time with a conscious rigor—set out to attack the highest philosophical speculations, dated in its unconscious form from the earliest eras of the world. At the same time that he invented God, man created the Devil, for one without the other would be impossible and inexplicable; good only acquires its significance in the presence of evil, and nothing can exist without its contrary. Humor, in this sense, does not only contradict, it completes. The known loses all its savor without mystery. The relative discontinuity of three dimensions can only subsist as a function of four-dimensional continuity—and without immobile eternity, temporal movement would be meaningless. Humor, as a principle of limitation, gives life to the world; as a principle of contradiction, it permits us to understand it—and that is why it sometimes qualifies as divine. Humor, at its birth, was the intimation—which finally became conscious—of the fourth dimension.

  This fourth dimension, in the earliest eras of the world, could only be glimpsed by the mind. It was what was called, for want of a better word, consciousness. Thanks to that entirely internal notion, man could construct an integral idea of nature, complete the sensorial notions of three-dimensional space with the fourth dimension, internally perceived, and thus judge the universe entire.

  It required many centuries of research for that notion, simple as it was, to be clarified in the human mind. It was understood that all the homogeneous information furnished by the senses had no intellectual value if it were not completed by the judgment of the mind; people sensed, even though that heterogeneous internal notion had no particular location in the mind, that it had total dominion. It was similarly understood that it alone could furnish the necessary bond between the past and the present, suggest notions of permanence, eternity and art—but no philosopher had succeeded in establishing the exact nature of that intimate sense and, for want of anything better, the fourth dimension met the expenses of all religions. The good news that it gave to human intelligence was projected externally; external objects were invented that were called the absolute, eternity, god or the infinite, and it was not understood that human intelligence was the centre of the world, that it alone united, in a complete fashion, all possible knowledge capable of revealing nature to us in its wholeness.

  The Leviathan itself was always ignorant of that intimate science of the fourth dimension and the principle of contradiction on which the life of the mind is built. It knew neither hatred no
r sacrifice; devotion was meaningless to it and love unknown. Excluded from evolution since the affair of the rejuvenation of cells, deprived of all intellectual life—since its social regulation, based on science, did not admit contradiction—the Leviathan suppressed all individual initiative, and even the functions of the reproduction of the race were confided to laboratories. The law-courts were suppressed, individual revolt no longer being recognized outside the medical domain. Everyone knew that the Leviathan, based on scientific “certainties,” could not be mistaken, and a tide of ennui soon descended upon the entire human race.

  It must be admitted, however, that it was not the work of humorists that reawakened the human cells from their dangerous lethargy; the extraordinary adventure of the apes struck a more resounding chord, and had an even more powerful impact on the masses.

  People immediately began talking, with astonishment, about a gorilla couple locked in one of the cages at the Museum that had been able, by virtue of patient labor, to slide back two bolts, open the door and hide by night in one of the vivisection laboratories--where their keepers were planned to commence long and interesting experiments on their two offspring, which had been removed from their loving company the previous day.

  There were excited comments regarding the frightful audacity of the mother, who, taking possession of various surgical instruments, had not hesitated to murder two of the Museum scientists and then flee to the roof, carrying her children.

  This individual revolt, coming from a mere animal, had a considerable impact on the human cells of the time, whose children were sacrificed every day to the needs of science without provoking any protest on their part.

  Certain examples of sensibility and devotion given by animals were recalled: timid hens protecting the nests of their chicks in the face of danger; seagulls that risked their lives to help a wounded companion; respect for ancestors among bears; wild beasts that only killed when driven by hunger; nostalgic monkeys which grieved bitterly over a flower from their homeland.

  A revolutionary party soon formed, composed of a few thinkers who did not hesitate to denounce the Leviathan as nothing but a monstrous, unconscious fetish constructed in three dimensions, and incapable, by virtue of that very fact, of usefully ruling the world.

  Thousands of people who had abdicated their personalities to the advantage of the social colossus understood how chimerical their hopes had been, and that there was no other truth or moral life than in the individual.

  That was the commencement of the slow disintegration of the Leviathan.

  A curious thing: the monster, to which contradiction was unknown, remained passive throughout the time that its trial was conducted before the tribunal of public opinion. Little by little, the reawakening of consciousness became complete, and it was understood, on the day when people wanted to be done with its omnipotence, that the omnipotence in question had been dead for a long time.

  One might think that, after the death of the Leviathan, there would have been an idealist renaissance. One was certainly advertised, in order to calm minds, but the material scientific organization of the world was so complex that it was science yet again that monopolized the renaissance to its own profit. A communism without authority was replaced by the pitiless dictatorship of an elite that was the reign of the Absolute Savants.

  In the chapters that follow, I shall relate certain curious and strange events that were revealed to me in the course of my journeys, which sufficiently characterize that brutal and authoritarian period in the great history of the world.

  XIX. The Dissociated Dog

  Among the monstrous adventures that marked the beginning of the Scientific Tyranny, it is necessary to pay particular attention to the extraordinary history of the Society for the Commercial Exploitation of the Planet Mars. Earth was, at that time, on the brink of disaster; a tiny incident might have resulted in its complete disintegration, save for an implausible combination of circumstances.

  It is well-known that scientists have been preoccupied for some time with the possibility of communication with the planet Mars. The most favorable place for attempts at interplanetary communication had finally been determined, and an immense experimental field had been set up there.

  The results obtained were kept strictly secret. It was, in fact, a financial organization with a capital of several millions that had resolved to establish the necessary communication, and it was understood that the organization in question was entitled to the exclusive benefit of any secrets that might by discovered by this means.

  For a long time, the results were negative. Immense luminous triangles or circles were described on the ground, and it was even decided one day to go to enormous expense to reconstitute luminously, on a base of 400 kilometers, the construction of the square of the hypotenuse. No conclusive response came from Mars.17

  The attempt was then made to reproduce on the ground, but in black light,18 the diagram of a phonographic impression. This time the result was immediate, and the company’s telegrapher, trembling with emotion and amazement, recorded a radio telegram that undoubtedly originated from the planet Mars, and was written in French.

  “Yes,” it said, “that’s very intelligent.”

  It was thought at first to be a joke played by the enemies of the Society; soon, though, it was necessary to yield to the evidence. The communications became more active and precise instructions were given by the Martians regarding the means by which communication might be facilitated by means of fluids capable of traversing space.

  It then became clear, amazingly, that ever since the invention of wireless telegraphy, the Martians had kept track of everything that happened on our planet, and that they were acquainted with the smallest details of our life. Needless to say, these communications remained secret, the Society jealousy conserving the information it was able to obtain from the Martians.

  Relations developed further every day. Important questions were asked of our neighbors about the way in which one could obtain energy cheaply by the dissociation of matter.

  For a long time, in fact, since the prophetic work of Dr. Gustave Le Bon, the discovery of radium and the researches of Sir Ernest Rutherford on the means of breaking the atomic bond, the question had urgently preoccupied all the scientists on Earth, It was well-understood, in fact, that matter, hitherto considered as inert and only able to return energy that one had first imparted to it, was, on the contrary, a colossal reservoir of energy. Thus, according to Dr. Le Bon, if one were able to dissociate, for instance, a one centime copper coin weighing a gram, one would obtain 510 billion kilogram-meters, which is about six billion 800 million horse-power if the gram of matter were dissociated in a second.

  That quantity of energy, appropriately redistributed, would be capable of driving, at 36 kilometers an hour, a 500-metric-ton goods train a little more than four and a quarter times around the circumference on the Earth. To effectuate the journey with the same train, powered by coal, it would be necessary to dispense 2,830,000 kilograms of coal—which is nearly 200,000 francs instead of a centime.19

  Alas, though, in order to transmute a gram of matter it was necessary to expend the greater energy of ten billion kilograms—and that transmutation, by ordinary means, would not have been economic but ruinous. It had, therefore, to be admitted that the question of the practical dissociation of matter, in addition to its scientific interest, was of serious economic interest to the financiers.

  The Martians’ response was satisfying, but incomplete:

  “No time to give you explanations; are immediately sending effluvium to dissociate whatever object is beside your apparatus.”

  The object in question happened to be a simple lamb cutlet on a plate, representing the telegrapher’s lunch; she had absent-mindedly let it go cold beside her. A few seconds later, it became evident from the scorch-marks and little fires produced all around it that the cutlet was slowly dissociating, and the Board of Directors, immediately alerted, came running.

  F
or long hours, the scientists studied the phenomena that were unfolding with veritable terror.

  At first, the symptoms of dissociation seemed to be localized at the extremity of the cutlet’s bone, but it was soon observed that the disintegration was gradually spreading to the entire cutlet, and then to the walnut that was beside it. There was no doubt that the phenomenon of dissociation was not localized, as in the observations previously made with radium; it was, on the contrary, like a faculty of disintegration that transmitted itself rapidly—which would soon reach the surrounding objects, the house, the country and perhaps the entire Earth.

  How could such phenomena be contained? How could their development be arrested? The interplanetary telegraph apparatus, destroyed at the start by the fire, did not permit any request for urgent instructions on this subject. Furthermore, the phenomena were beginning to take on a truly frightening intensity. The dissociation was visibly proceeding in fits and starts; now it was a matter of simple burning, then violent detonations shook the walls, knocking over the onlookers. In a few minutes, perhaps in a few seconds, they would doubtless witness a total destruction, a veritable explosion of the entire universe.

  It was then that something happened that was very simple, but which nevertheless sufficed to modify the history of the world.

  Suddenly, while the consternated scientists stood dumbstruck around the mysterious table, a dog belonging to the workshop janitor—who happened to be passing by—bounded into the room, grabbed the cutlet and ran off with it into the fields. Immediately, everyone else launched themselves in pursuit.

  The animal seemed to have gone mad; it was leaping about randomly, the hundredfold multiplication of its strength permitting it to outpace the most skilful aviators sent in search of it. At last, run to earth from all directions, mad with pain, burned by the infernal cutlet that it had swallowed, it hurled itself into the river.