Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  To the great astonishment of all the observers, the trainee teacher, while subject to the operation, became delirious, swore that he would let two three-sou items go for a franc and that he would make nothing on the camembert. At the same time he gave such precise information regarding life behind the lines during the Petty War of 1914 that the bemused scientists embarked upon a rapid enquiry. It revealed that an ancestor of the trainee teacher had been a profiteer in 1918 and that it was undoubtedly his ancient impressions that his descendant had perceived directly during the operation.

  It is evident, in fact, that innumerable memories slumber in the deep layers of the brain, not merely of a particular individual but of his ascendants. Many an infant folds a newspaper instinctively or scratches his ear in the same manner as a grandfather he never knew. Certain reflexes and certain instinctive repugnances come to us from an unknown ancestor. But there is much more; one often recognizes towns or landscapes that one sees for the first time; one experiences seemingly-ancient admirations or sympathies for art-works or people one recognizes without ever having seen them before. This is because we live superficially, with the sensations of the moment and memories of the day before; we are ignorant of the immensity of an unexplored subconscious in which billions of sensations and ideas of people who have preceded us are often enclosed.

  Thanks to the skillfully-localized anesthesia of present layers of memory and the hyperesthesia of the subconscious, the scientists of that era were soon able to organize veritable voyages into history. They all volunteered to effectuate soundings of the past—and just as aviators had once competed to break altitude records, voyagers in the subconscious became keen rivals to travel the furthest possible distances into History.

  That was a strange time, when people absented themselves from the present for months to live exclusively in memories unexpectedly brought back to the surface by the anesthesia of contemporary memories. Unsuspected details were thus obtained of life in past centuries—and as the present era, uniquely devoted to Science, was no longer very entertaining, the explorers of history became more numerous every day.

  This fashion was brought to an end by legislation when the scandal of the celebrated scientist Sodium broke. By virtue of a line of descent of which history had not conserved any trace, Sodium, retracing his memories by elimination, ended up by incarnating one of his ancestors in his own person: King Caribert, who, even though married to Queen Ingoberge,27 had been seized by an irresistible passion for his two chambermaids, one of whom was named Marcovèphe and the other Meroflède. The fact was not unknown, being recorded in the Chronicles of Saint-Denis, but no one had realized the force of the passion in question. When the scientist Sodium arrived at that era of his ancestral memories, he found himself so content with his two chambermaids that he deliberately refused to redescend through history to return to the marvelous century of Science.

  This example might have been pernicious and upset the perfect social equilibrium in which the citizens of that era lived. It was therefore decided, by means of the successive hyperesthesia of recent layers of memory, to bring Sodium back to his own time—but Sodium, who was familiar with all the methods that might be employed to force him to leave his two chambermaids, suffered such a fit of despair that he committed suicide in History. In that same year, the Scientific State banned voyages in the subconscious, on pain of death, and the mathematical and fastidious life resumed its normal course, as before.

  XXV. Man Cut In Two

  In year 23 of the New Era, dating from the Mastery of the Atom, the obstinacy of scientists almost led humankind to ruin for a second time.

  After the death of the Leviathan, it was understood that thoroughgoing materialism possessed no serious basis, and that it ought to be definitively abandoned. If the Leviathan was dead, it was assumed, it was doubtless because its gigantic body had been constructed in three dimensions, neglectful of the necessary support of the fourth internal dimension to which human existence was owed.

  Since the most remote times, in fact, it had been known that life was nothing but a perpetual sequence of actions and reactions between the external and internal worlds, and that this double movement, this contradiction, was frequently represented in ancient religions by the symbol of respiration. As soon as the Leviathan disappeared, the opposition of the human personality to the external world was better and more distinctly understood, and it was affirmed that consciousness, properly understood, was nothing but an internal and innate sense of the fourth dimension. This internal sense was found at the same time to furnish the key to the great problems of space and time; it permitted the integration of all human notions, the reconstitution of the entire world outside any idea of space and time, forming a unique whole, without beginning or end, describing in a single line what had been taken until then for the successive actions of centuries.

  Immediately, as science was unable to stop at simple philosophical intuitions, and had to have immediate recourse to the enlightenment of analysis, the most extravagant experiments were carried out on the human body. The ancient assertion of the mages of old concerning the necessary intervention of an even number in all human constructions was taken up again, on a new basis. The considerable mistake was, however, made of neglecting, for the moment, the odd number that was found in all ancient myths and which completed—whether it was the number 12 by the number 13, or the number six by the number seven—the calculation of divine unity. They simple stated the fundamental duality of all superior beings, and undertook, in the laboratories, to cut men in two, in the vertical sense, in order to facilitate a complete analysis.

  Needless to say, no sooner had the operative technique been developed to a high degree of perfection than such operations came to seem quite natural.

  Those first experiments were not crowned with any success. It seemed, however, logical, by working along a vertical plane passing through the bridge of the nose, to separate a man composed of two similar halves, and who, properly speaking, was nothing but a duplicate being. Unfortunately, I repeat, this analysis did not yield any satisfactory result. Although it had been possible for several centuries to section a human being horizontally, conclusively depriving him of the double usage of certain limbs, the vertical operation remained impossible.

  In transverse section, veritably marvelous operations had been realized. After accomplishing the banal ablation of two arms and two legs, that of the trunk was similarly successful. By means of simply-excavated channels, the head was enabled to live in isolation without any difficulty. They even succeeded in isolating the brain by horizontal section, then a layer of the cerebral substance. Although the body, thus reduced, presented two opposed and symmetrical parts, it undoubtedly continued to manifest all the characteristics of life.

  On the contrary, the vertical section—seemingly much more logical and much simpler to achieve, since it resulted in the subsistence of two complete halves, each having one eye, one ear, one lung, one auricle, one ventricle, one cerebral hemisphere and so on—always had the effect of instantaneously extinguishing the very sources of life, as if life were, in reality, only due to an antagonism, a contradiction, between similar organs, one positive and one negative.

  The scientists of that time, in their obstinacy, were not at all discouraged; the division of man that they could not obtain anatomically they attempted from a purely psychic point of view. Little by little, they succeeded in training the human race, then much diminished by science, and dividing it into two clearly-opposed classes.

  On the one hand, there was what came to be called neo-materialists, constructed in the image of the Leviathan, among whom all consciousness was abolished, and who only conserved a three-dimensional vision of the world. Their purely reflexive movements were sustained by the everyday needs of social life; they knew no other orders than the scientific regulations of the external world; their discipline was absolute, their science very complete, their intelligence totally extinct.

  On the other ha
nd, there was what came to be called idealists, who were deprived of any means of relating to the external world of three dimensions. Their lot was, in reality, that of ancient Hindu fakirs and their internal life developed in strange proportions. Provided solely with the sense of the fourth dimension, they were entirely ignorant of time and space. For them, phenomena did not succeed one another; for them, there were soon no longer any phenomena at all.

  The scientists of the Great Central Laboratory were at first intoxicated by the results they had obtained; they had finally, after their fashion, completed the analysis of man; they had decomposed and had power over the separate elements making up his life. Their enthusiasm diminished when they came to understand that these elements, thus separated, were incapable, either on one side or the other, of reproduction, and that humankind would soon be extinct forever. They had successfully isolated what had previously constituted, for them, the idealist element, but it proved that the element in question could only react in contradiction with the material element. Only by the reunion of the two elements could the eternal flame of intelligence—the immortal life that, until then, had guided humankind to its highest destiny—be reignited.

  The scientists imagined that they possessed all the elements of the problem, having analyzed human intelligence to its extreme limits, but it proved that human intelligence could only manifest itself in its three-dimensional symbols. They had acted in the fashion of chemists who had isolated all the simple bodies composing a crystal, but who could not find in that analysis the geometric form of the crystal, which had entirely disappeared.

  Thus, after centuries of research, progress and analyses, the scientists found themselves brutally returned to their point of departure: the profound ignorance that everyone had had, in the earliest ages of the world, of the origins of life, of the undeniable but always ungraspable reality of ideas. It soon became necessary to make use of the coarsest procedures, utterly unworthy of science; it was necessary, at all costs, to reawaken passions that had supposedly been abolished forever, to revert to the ridiculous exploit that the men of old had called love.

  Humankind, differentiated into passionless materialists and idealists detached from any phenomenal preoccupation, now seemed incapable of feeling the erotic passions of old. It was necessary to appeal to two despised beings that had been conserved in the Museum as mere ethnographic specimens, and who lived in the most absolute scientific ignorance. They had to excite the most vulgar passions in this primitive couple: jealousy, cruelty, envy. They had to dress the man in sumptuous ornaments, in the manner of prehistoric males, to provoke in his companion the outrage of being abandoned or badly dressed. When she finally complained to the chief warder that she did not have a stitch to wear, they began to understand that humanity would soon be saved. The rest was a matter of time, and ancient creatures conformed with the complexity of primal ages eventually began to emerge from the State incubators, whose intelligence came to life once again.

  It was, as if by a miracle, the rebirth of man: the lamp of Psyche lit up again for centuries on end, still mysterious, still incomprehensible but, as ever, saving humankind continually from the successive failures of science.

  XXVI. The Photophonium Catastrophe

  It was some time after the death of the Leviathan that the terrible Photophonium catastrophe occurred, which turned the scientific world upside down.

  The tyranny of the Leviathan, which had weighed upon man for a long time, had taught the majority of scientists a lesson. It was finally understood that if a colossal personality, superior to man, had been able to form in the world, incorporating human beings as simple cells, the fault lay entirely with the absurd and prideful certainty of materialists who, admitting nothing but positive discoveries and rejecting any idealist theory, had thrown themselves into the monster’s mouth, in accordance with naïve and ancient predictions.

  This vanity of wanting to know everything by the sole means of the testimony of the senses was, however—it had to be admitted—quite puerile. The senses, as they existed in the men of old, were nothing but five little windows opening upon nature in different places. Outside the senses, the world was nothing but a collection of obscure and silent vibrations and, according to whether these vibrations were more or less frequent in each second, they were perceived by one or other of the senses. Thus, from 32 vibrations per second to 3600, it was the ear that perceived them in the form of sound. Beyond that, the vibrations were unknown. Further on, the eye began to perceive vibrations at 40 trillion a second (red light) and lost sight of them at 756 trillions (violet light).

  In addition to the vibrations perceived by the ear or the eye, others exist in nature, some of which are perceived by the nose, the tongue or the skin, others by the thermometer, photographic plates or registered by electrical apparatus. Theoretically, therefore, nothing prevented man from having other senses analogous to the eye or the ear, permitting him to perceive countless beauties that were unknown to him, and it was known that certain animals, since the origins of the world, had been able to perceive phenomena to which man was blind: the pigeon’s instinct of orientation and the dog’s sense of smell provided that more than adequately.

  During the period of the Leviathan’s tyranny, it was supposed that that superior animal, a newcomer in the scale of beings, must have retained innumerable unknown sensations to its own advantage, but it was also thought that it had not perceived things in the same fashion. How had it translated the sensations of light or sound? Had there been a transposition or a synthesis of all those vibrations? Had it surrendered itself to unknown orgies of vibrations inaccessible to man? No one ever found out—but once it was dead, for fear that a similar tyranny might reappear on Earth, nothing seemed more pressing than to renounce the positive doctrines of old in order to launch resolutely into the research of the unknown.

  Before anything else, there was a matter of transforming human sensations, of augmenting their intensity, developing senses beyond known limits and gradually creating, as required, new senses that would permit people to have a more extensive understanding of nature. A special institute was immediately founded: the Photophonium, dedicated to the upbringing of human beings endowed with a superior sensibility. It was proposed to enhance each sense somewhat in every subject, causing him to perceive vibrations hitherto reserved to senses superior to his, and eventually liberating the sense of sight, whose former functions would be replaced by an inferior sense, in order to render it disposable for the possible vision of the invisible.

  The results were not immediate, but after three successive generations they exceeded all hopes. Soon, the old sensations were improving every day; it was no more than a game for the pupils of the Photophonium to experience the sensations of odor and taste via the intermediary of touch. In their laboratory experiments, it was no longer necessary for them to put chemical products into their mouths or smell them in order to recognize them; it was sufficient to touch them. Progress proceeding in parallel for the entire body, the most distinguished among them clearly perceived luminous sensations by means of the ears. It was, at first, only a vague, opaque light, like the sensations experienced by a myopic individual considering a distant landscape; then, new nervous receptors having been placed behind the tympanum by the Laboratory’s scientists, the sensations became clearer; an arrangement of optical mirrors easily rectified the divergent views obtained by the ears, and the former vision of the eyes, realized henceforth by the former auditory sense, was perfect.

  To tell the truth, this did not constitute a goal even while it was being pursued, but merely a preliminary step. What was necessary, in fact, before anything else, was to liberate the superior sense of sight from its former functions and to educate the eye in such a fashion that it was able to perceive new, superior vibrations hitherto inaccessible to man. For that, a special optical apparatus had been invented: the Aphanoscope—which, it was thought, would permit the invisible to be seen.

  Snobs—for they are f
ound in every epoch—naturally took pleasure in these novelties, in order to appear not to sense things in the same way as everyone else. Numerous concerts were thus arranged in which the sounds were perceived by smell and by taste, in which good music was sampled after the fashion of a wine-tasting. There were also fine spectacles put on, which the aesthetes of the moment took pleasure in seeing through their ears.

  During this time, serious research continued at the Photophonium; people waited anxiously to know what the first sensations perceived by the disaffected eyes might be, and the ocular apparatus of the pupils was progressively improved to this end. Electric stimulators were placed in direct communication with the eyes, which could already perceive X-rays through opaque bodies and discern hitherto unknown influences and vibrations in the atmosphere.

  It was at this moment that the frightful Photophonium catastrophe occurred, in the course of a final session that took place in the great amphitheater, in which the attempt was made to obtain a clearer and more distinct vision of invisible things on the part of the pupils.

  First, there was one loud scream in the hall, then others; the pupils could see, and as they saw more, their agitation became extreme. Habituated as they were to calm scientific methods and to logical and well-balanced deductions, they saw all the sensations of the past abruptly surge forth before their eyes: all the vibrations accumulated in the air over centuries, all the wasted words; all the evil influences, desires or hatreds; the phantasmal apparitions of the ideas of old; and their terrible future consequences.

  They saw everything that nature, in its wisdom, had hidden until then from the infancy of human beings, by offering them the art-work of selective sensation. For them, it was as if a frightful storm had suddenly broken out in the hall. Perceived in the form of luminous impressions, that disconcerting chaos deranged their minds and broke the aphanoscopes with which they were surrounded, unleashing a tempest in their crazed brains.