Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  Needless to say, from the moment of their creation, haste was made to give the benefits of all these advantages to the supermen, and animal grafts were complicated by even more cumbersome mechanical grafts.

  When, after years of education, the productive cells of the supermen were finally grafted into fully-developed bodies, the unfortunates were supercharged with all the latest scientific developments. Soon they were no more than deformed, monstrous creatures, equipped with telepathic telegraphy and calculating machines, walking encyclopedias uniting all human knowledge within themselves, subject to a central distribution console. To support this formidable mechanical assemblage, they had recourse to multiple grafts and adjunctions of innumerable limbs; the supermen were somewhat reminiscent of many-legged human elephants, deprived of all plastic beauty, which had to be immobilized, for the sake of public safety, in the halls of the Central Museum.

  The scientists dared not admit their disappointment; they hid these monstrous beings invented by their pride—which were ignorant of beauty, common sense and generosity—from all eyes.

  All this would have remained an event of no great importance in the history of the world if that same year had not seen, in the vicinity of the Great Central Laboratory, the disappearance of a young woman of great beauty who, for a long time, had not concealed her scorn for the scientists of that Laboratory and who lived resolutely, in opposition to the preoccupations of the era, a life entirely devoted to grace and elegance. This disappearance remained most mysterious; there was talk of vengeance, vile vivisection, irreducible hatred of beauty engendered by science, but the power of the scientists of the Great Central Laboratory was so great, at that time, that the affair was classified as a legend and never had any consequences.

  XXXII. The Conjuration of Larvae 32

  When the wall of the Great Central Laboratory began to displace itself slowly and smoothly to be swallowed up in the door that gave access to the Institute’s great library, it was understood that something abnormal had just happened in the scientific world, and that the causes of the curious phenomena must be investigated immediately.

  Many years before, the ideas of matter and evolution had been profoundly modified; it was admitted that the old prejudice which made evolution into an inimitable model had evidently been stripped of all foundation, and it was in another direction that man must seek the natural course of progress. It was not without a smile that people recalled the distant era of the glorification of the beauty of labor, the benefits of association and the marvelous ascension achieved by nature since the world’s beginning in creating ever-more-complex creatures.

  It was, curiously enough, sociology that had first indicated to scientists the age-old error that they had got into their heads in such an absurd fashion. In fact, the history of societies proves to us that, in every era, men have striven, not to work, but, on the contrary, to deliver themselves from all material cares by making other men or machines work in their stead. In the same way, when a man accepts the social contract that binds him to all others, he only yields to a simple kind of sloth, seeking to specialize himself and only to accomplish one part of the general effort, only repeating the same action endlessly, thus following the law of least effort. This is why exceedingly unhappy individuals, in a socially inferior condition, have often preferred to remain in that state than to attempt an effort that might have raised them up, and it is similarly for that reason that great conquerors and the masters of the world have always found plenty of docile subjects preferring to obey their orders or those of another rather than make the necessary effort themselves. In every case, whether it is a matter of masters or slaves, it is always the least effort and the least danger that everyone seeks to achieve, some from on high and others from below.

  Nature, in its successive creations, has done nothing but indicate in advance the pretended forward march of civilizations. It is by the law of least effort that work and matter have always been directed; it is by virtue of that same law that increasingly complex associations are created in elementary atoms, always better satisfying the desire for sloth that rules the world.

  Contrary to what was believed in the early eras of science, the dissociation of matter is not, therefore, a diminution, a return to nothingness, but rather an effort that matter makes towards idea, in order to return to a superior individualism after being enriched by the multiple experiences of association. Association in an organized body is, on the contrary, nothing but a pause, a specialization diminishing the primal universal activity, a moment of sloth to which a rapid dissociation will eventually do justice. The Hindu philosophy—which preached a return, not to nothingness, but to nirvana—was the only one in ancient times to glimpse that true march of the world towards individual perfection.

  When the researchers of the scientific era had finally understood that fundamental verity, they gradually ceased to interest themselves in complex organization and they attempted, on the contrary, to return to basics and to release, so far as they could, the elementary atom containing in embryo all known forces and all imaginable possibilities.

  This elementary atom, ancestor of all simple bodies and all known energies—this larva, as it was eventually to be dubbed—was finally released, reconstituted by synthesis in its primal state, as it exists at the beginning of worlds when it is no more than a simple particle of a nebula.

  Unfortunately, it has to be admitted, these larvae, cultivated in great quantity in the Great Central Laboratory, were not adequately monitored. There were some, naturally enough, that escaped through the walls, and others that lodged themselves in material objects situated in the environs of the Laboratory. A strange series of phenomena, calculated to distress the scientists of the day, was immediately produced.

  As in the most terrifying ancient times, the Earth was seen to open up, fabulous creatures spontaneously generating and dying of some fault of construction, in the fashion of prehistoric monsters. There were public monuments that began to move, to groan like veritable living beings, and others that set off across country in formless masses, like block of matter melted by consequence of some incomprehensible molecular labor.

  Visibly, these artificial larvae, too rapidly germinated, incapable of remaining isolated, full of modern ideas and disorganized by centuries of organization, were attempting to escape their formidable individuality by associating themselves randomly with matter, improvising around themselves hastily-constructed and ill-conceived entities.

  It was briefly feared that this movement of organization might overtake all matter and turn the world upside down. Luckily, the phenomena gradually diminished by dispersion. From time to time, there were occasional disconcerting apparitions of unnamable phantoms and bizarre movements of material objects that could not be explained, but the association of matter did not go any further, and the monstrous products of these larvae, unaccustomed to the environment, did not take long to perish.

  The experiment, as may be guessed, was not renewed; it was, however, from that moment on that people began to understand more fully what the life of matter was, and no longer to consider material objects as simple inferior creations unworthy of human consideration. Everyone feared to trouble anew the formidable reservoirs of unknown forces and energies that nature hid, and men prudently continued to live their lives in the immense cemetery of the world, which they now knew to be populated by the living dead.

  XXXIV. Body-Letting

  I understood very early on, perhaps in my dreams of infancy, that there had to be a means of sustaining man in the air much safer and much simpler than mechanical aviation. Aviation is, in fact, a rough scientific solution, an entirely external transitional method, which can only interest barbarians. Gravitation is a force that must be vanquished and neutralized by developing forces innate within us. Furthermore, we know that these forces are real because we can, in certain pathological cases, observe their effects outside a human body from which they have escaped.

  Clinical observatio
n has been made of a young hysteric who felt impressions of burning or freezing directly when the water in which she had washed her hands was thrown, while she was not present, into fire or on to ice. Similarly, the displacements of furniture and the materializations that exteriorization of force can produce are well-known. In all times, man has understood instinctively that he can, by cultivating his will-power, combat external influences and counterbalance the natural forces surrounding him solely by his own personal forces. At all times he has sensed that he can shield himself from attraction, rise up into the air and hover above the ground, without requiring recourse to any mechanical stratagem.

  This preoccupation is found in all religions; it forms the basis of all moral beliefs, all artistic symbols.

  It is in dreams, especially, that these indications become more precise. With a great contention of will and a continued effort of mind, it does not take long to feel that one is losing contact with the ground and that, without making any movement, one has set oneself a little way above it. Unfortunately, it always takes a painful effort that requires sustained attention, and the equilibrium obtained is never very satisfactory; one awkward shift, one ill-timed movement, and the threat of falling is immediately urgent—without, however, being realized.

  When I arrived in the land of the fourth dimension, I learned without astonishment that during the Scientific Era this mode of locomotion was much in favor—but people had been gradually obliged to abandon it by reason of the cerebral fatigue that it provoked in all its adepts, and especially the extraordinarily grave social disorder that had resulted from it.

  Levitation applied to material bodies, in fact, demands considerable nervous effort. The mediums who, while sitting on a chair, have succeeded in leaving the ground and going to set themselves, along with their chair, on a table, always experience extreme fatigue following that excessive effort. When the subject is well-balanced, that poses no other inconvenience but to himself, but when there are losses of nervous force, or when that force is misdirected beyond the single task that one is trying to accomplish, it expands in all directions, drifting aimlessly, and results in very curious phenomena. These are generally objects that form in mid-air, unknown to the person, or displacements of existing objects without any possible control.

  At the time when levitation became a fashionable mode of transport, there was a considerable quantity of lost force which extended thus, at hazard, through the towns and the country, only awaiting an opportunity to manifest itself and provoke the most distressing phenomena.

  While it was only a question of insignificant manifestations, it was not very serious. From time to time, one observed that telegraph poles were growing beards; mechanical objects or items of furniture sometimes acquired the faculty of sight, hearing or smell. Such events were as surprising as they were distressing, but people soon grew used to them.

  Unfortunately, when the vagabond forces began to attack factories and socially useful machines, the danger of tolerating such abuses was recognized. Soon, light-distributors began to talk or sing; thick clouds, suddenly solidified, formed dangerous reefs into which aviators crashed; ships and trains were transformed into bouquets of roses or bottles of eau de cologne—and worse catastrophes threatened at every moment.

  The scientific government had therefore formally to prohibit all transport by levitation, and any other cerebral effort designed to utilize the human will outside the prescriptions laid down by the regulations of general policing.

  It was then that, to get around the difficulty, people took advantage the method of exteriorization formerly indicated by spirits, which consisted of abandoning one’s material body by a simple effort of will in order to displace what had formerly been called one’s “astral body.”

  The inconvenience of such a method was to remove, by the same token, any material possibility of action from the traveler. By means of astral bodies we can, indeed, move from one place to another with the greatest ease in the world and sense what is happening there, but we can only communicate with persons using their material bodies if they put another material body at our disposal, abandoned by its own astral body and consequentially empty.

  Needless to say, the Economical Travel Companies immediately got a grip on the problem, and organized special hotels almost everywhere, in which one could find everything one needed to be able to act on arrival. A man could, for example, leave his material body empty in Paris, transport himself by thought to Marseilles and there find, in the special hotel, an empty “spokesman” body that was put at his disposal, permitting him to take care of all his business in the city, communicating with his clients. During the period of the lease, the astral body of the newfangled spokesman would take a stroll in the country, without any worries.

  Unfortunately, this method, simple as it was, was also not long delayed in causing grave inconveniences. Skillful crooks exploited the situation by obtaining information. When they were sure that the material body of a known individual was empty in Paris, during his mind’s absence, they made haste to abandon their own bodies—as one does an old suit of clothes—and to take up lodgings in the body of the known individual, which they then refused to quit. Use was widely made of a system of psychic anthropometry permitting the identification of people by their external appearances rather than their mental imprints, but deplorable confusions resulted nevertheless, particularly in conjugal relationships. These abuses were such that new measures, even more rigorous, had soon to be taken.

  Furthermore, persons possessed of socially interesting situations hesitated to leave their material bodies and travel any distance. Fear of a theft, a substitution of their identity, almost always restrained them. Who knew whether, during their absence, the astral body of some miserable street-urchin might not animate their material body and make it commit misdeeds of the worst sort?

  This was, as one might imagine, a period of surprising adventures, and one can only laugh at it when one thinks of the extreme simplicity of the fourth-dimensional procedures that were later to sweep aside all these barbarous methods.

  XXXV. The Garden of Planets 33

  In the days when the Great Central Laboratory was beginning to achieve omnipotence, a feeling of hatred for what had formerly been called, in barbarous times, Beauty gradually developed in everyone’s mind. Already, in the most ancient eras, thinkers who lived for pure ideas had excluded poets from their republic.34 Much later, at the same time as the first mutterings of the new science, the total practical uselessness was proclaimed of the ancient magical, religious and literary formulas that had cradled the infancy of humankind.

  To begin with, all religions, whose symbolism appeared excessively naïve, were suppressed. Then, little by little, literature and the fine arts—religions no less powerful, but just as naïve—had been attacked. Why invent false histories, why fabricate entirely imaginary heroes? The men of the scientific age had less and less understanding of the necessity of these puerile fables that did not correspond at all to the practical realities of the moment and caused everyone to waste precious time. In the beginning, the writers and artists tried of their own accord to accommodate their productions to the taste of the day, by offering the public rigorously exact analyses of reality, scientific reports minutely established according to nature, or works of decorative art narrowly applied to the immediate needs of life, but it did not take long to decide that all these were merely useless illusions and a gulf was hollowed out, definitive and profound, between the fine arts of yesteryear and the scientific dreams of the new world.

  Soon, the ideal being entirely displaced, one could not consider without suffering ancient monuments surcharged with fetishistic figures designed, no doubt, to avert bad luck; one could not read without disgust the literary lies of the great poets of old who tried to hide their own sensations and personal adventures behind the inexact faces of imaginary heroes. Elegance was henceforth entirely within the usefulness of lines or the indication of movement; beauty was to be foun
d in force, charm in speed.

  Nevertheless, during that transitional era, all not all the experiments that were made were exclusively scientific or ungraceful. There were very pretty ones among them that would have seduced the poets of times past.

  Undoubtedly, when the first exteriorizations of nervous force were provoked by levitation, there were—as we have just seen—certain phenomena well fitted to alarm sensitive souls in the scientific world. Under the influence of the imagination of the individuals present, the nervous force dispersed in the air materialized in the most various forms. Here they were enormous larvae, terrifying animals, there immense viscous protozoans, which sometimes borrowed the forms of inanimate objects or scientific instruments in order to manifest themselves.

  The confusions that were created between material objects and living beings did not take long, however, to furnish precious indications regarding the nature of things. It was rapidly understood that, if the human personality could duplicate itself, that of animals, plants and even material objects could equally well support the same duplication.

  We have seen how, during that period, certain people acquired the habit of only displacing their immaterial body when they traveled, forsaking incarnation for a few hours, lodging in a material body vacated for the occasion hired to them by a hotelier. These journeys, soon forbidden by the Great Central Laboratory because of the disorder they provoked within the State, were still tolerated in certain limited conditions in the era of holiday resorts and in a place specially designed by the Absolute Savants, which was named the Garden of Planets.