Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  She had, in fact, undertaken to horrify that insatiable dreamer, with whom she was imprisoned for the purpose of perpetuating the race and who persisted in dreaming about the stars all day long, and celebrating his companion’s beauty in every fashion, in verse and even in prose—for he was a true poet.

  Often, in the secret hope of provoking an unwonted fit of anger, the woman-specimen had told the poet-type that she was deceiving him with Hydrogen, but the poet-type had not believed her, because she was beautiful and old Hydrogen was fearfully ugly. The woman-specimen had then attempted to explain the moral reasons that drove her to deceive her poetic companion: quite genuinely, she did not understand poetry at all; she found that perpetual quest for the unreal utterly ridiculous; she could not imagine that anyone could see the appeal of tall stories and fairy tales. By contrast, Hydrogen’s scientific certainty, his effective and material power, was infinitely seductive to her; she hoped that her companion the poet might kill Hydrogen and take possession of his scientific power.

  She had tried a little harder every day to excite his jealousy of his rival, but had never succeeded. The poet did not believe her, in fact; for him, the woman was a divine being, all sensibility, intelligence and beauty, which nature had created to be understood. Her changing character, her abrupt mood-shifts, made a new woman every day, and the poet delightedly studied his own reflection every day in that ocean of passions, ever-changing and yet always the same, as if in the mirror of his own mind.

  The poet had no desire to kill Hydrogen, firstly because he was not at all jealous, unable to suppose for a single instant that the other’s gross materiality could have any attraction for the woman, and also because he was blissfully happy. Sometimes, for pleasure, he had tried to show jealousy; he had even killed a homunculus that, out of sympathy, had told him the truth, but in the most powerful of his fits of anger he instinctively employed the most subtle and surest means of not learning anything compromising.

  Furthermore, violent and brutal acts were not the sort of thing he did; the practice of poetry had elevated him to higher summits; he addressed the stars intimately, upset the universe, struck down the gods; he wanted the objects of which he had made use, even for an instant, to be broken after he passed by; he would have fought an army of giants on his own. He was, in a word, a proud poet—which is to say, an infinitely timid creature, for whom the slightest reality was sufficient to throw him into confusion. The mere idea of learning something untoward terrified him; he was afraid of everything, even clouds, because every object, even the most futile, was for him filled with inextricable problems, imprecise threats and disturbing phantoms; like a child, he was only happy when he could amuse himself with picture-books or believe that the Moon only existed as a function of his desires.

  When the woman-specimen incited him, directly or indirectly, to kill the Absolute Savant she described a brilliant future for him in which they would be masters of the Central Laboratory; she told him that, as possessors of the universal science, they would then be like gods. He did not believe it; he replied that there was something else beyond what she saw, that ideas alone were certain, that divinity was within us. Then his eyes lost themselves in the sky, attentively following the ideas that floated slowly by—as certain animals sometimes do when watching unknown things pass through the air.

  When the Laboratory scandal broke, undeniable and inevitable, the poet did not give way to the fit of violence that the woman-specimen expected of him. There was no movement of revolt, nor even of surprise. To him, a material novelty counted for nothing; only the moral fall of his ideal appeared to affect him. For several days, he did not reappear; he was only seen in the ethnographic collections of the Laboratory, actively seeking a nail from past ages and a rope of the ancient sort, which had not been woven by the scientific world. It was even rumored that, above the nail that he hammered into his bedroom wall, he drew a naïve image of the Earth’s satellite. No one knew why. It was simply observed, some time afterwards, that he had died of asphyxia, and the loss was regretfully recorded by the Curator of the Great Museum’s collections.

  Hydrogen resumed his place in the Council of Absolute Savants, and good explanations were given to the people and homunculi of the extreme devotion that the great scientist invested in his studies of ancient questions, perilous and devoid of contemporary interest.

  As for the woman-specimen, there was great anxiety on her behalf. An incomprehensible thing: when she learned of the disappearance of her companion, she exhibited an immense despair. Henceforth, having no one on Earth to torment, her life was pointless. To avoid any complication, the wise decision was taken to declassify her; she was retired from the collections, in spite of the historical interest she presented.

  Her ancient brain was replaced by a model 327 phosphor-aluminum box and she was lost, unconscious and docile, in the servile crowd of homunculi.

  XLII. The Massacre of the Homunculi

  A scientist who considers the nature of things in his laboratory will always remain ignorant of the possibility of repugnance or disgust. However noxious the compound he is examining might be, he will taste it, if necessary, with all the tranquility in the world. Compounds are nothing to him but unknown chemical composites, always the same.

  In the wake of considerable progress of science, men ended up examining everything from that special scientific angle; for them, all the phenomena of nature became equally interesting, without it being possible to establish any meaningful distinction between a chemical reaction, for example, and a violent passion experienced for good or evil. Above human beings, moreover, were placed the machines that ensured the existence of the entire world, and the materializations of collective intelligence that took the form of great factories were put well ahead of simple individual manifestations of thought. By virtue of an entirely natural tendency, the artificial animals created by man to serve his daily needs were also objects of much sympathy in that era.

  People had already noticed, in the earliest days of civilization, that the new kinds of machines were breaking violently with the artistic traditions of the past and were, by contrast, reminiscent of the creations of nature.

  The automobile had been the first instrument of current usage to give some indication of this direction. In barbaric times, the automobile had been imagined somewhat in the manner of a Greek temple or an item of Louis XV furniture; its mechanical parts had been willingly concealed beneath a stylish body-work modeled on a Roman ship or a Sedan chair, and the most fantastic projects were then proposed. It required the intervention of necessity in order for it to be understood how old-fashioned that way of thinking was, and how ill-fitted to the new ideology.

  Racing cars, designed according to the immediate exigencies of speed, were the first to indicate the path that would have to be followed. At first, artists qualified them as monsters; then, gradually shedding ancient prejudices, they celebrated their new harmony and imperious beauty. Soon, when the automobile had conquered its new form, solely thanks to the indications of empiricism, it was finally understood that it simply realized, without anyone having been aware of it, the complete and logical structure of a new animal.

  From the head, with its eyes and voice, to the black evacuation-mechanism of the exhaust-pipe, the automobile behaved like a simple animal, with the same weaknesses, the same fainting fits, the same fever at certain hours of the day, tempered by the sudation of the radiator, the same recovery of strength at nightfall, the beating heart of its valves, the vertebral column of its transmission, sending movement to the motive hind-limbs via the intermediary of a differential in the form of a pelvis, while the front wheels felt their way along the road. The circulation of water, the circulation of oil and the electrical nervous system were as many distinct networks dictated by imperious logic—as if, in all construction, certain natural laws demanded the same forms, the same processes. The new creature was distinguished from natural creatures by the idea of the wheel and gears, but that was all
that distinguished it from them.

  No one saw anything in this but an amusing resemblance, as long as man was credited with a divine intelligence superior to matter—but when materialism had made further progress, when people began to see all phenomena, material or moral, as nothing but a simple juxtaposition of molecular forces, they asked themselves whether the artificial animals could be logically distinguished from natural animals by anything other than their imperfections.

  The question became even more vexing as the artificial animals were further improved. Almost everywhere, at the beginning of the scientific era, homunculi designed to play the roles of the slaves of old were beginning to be constructed for industrial and domestic use.

  These homunculi varied in form according to the functions for which they were designed. A homunculus responsible for supervising the work of automatic lathes in a factory was obviously not the same as a homunculus in charge of a telegraphic station or the preparation of toxic products in a laboratory. All of them, however, were constructed in approximate imitation of the human body; all of them were endowed with adequately-regulated reflexes, and the perfection of their mechanism was such that people often had trouble distinguishing a homunculus, in the course of his work, from an ordinary man.

  It is necessary to add, moreover, that the scientists of the Great Central Laboratory had imparted a certain elegance to the perfect realization of the dream of seekers of old. They had doubtless had recourse to the famous recipes of Paracelsus in constructing their homunculi. The latter were not, as they ancient alchemists had imagined, little creatures devoid of gravity, sexless and equipped with supernatural powers. On the contrary, the scientists amused themselves by making them as similar to humans as possible, with the secret hope that, by faithfully reproducing the forms of nature, their creations would become ever-closer to nature.

  There were even, at that time, strange laboratory homunculi into which nervous fluid appropriated from certain animals was transmitted, and which, little by little appeared to be giving evident signs of independence and initiative.

  Almost everywhere, with too much haste, the instinctive development of homunculi was encouraged. Their makers watched avidly for the birth of human vices within them; their caprices were complacently encouraged; their desires were developed.

  All of this was merely a distraction of superior scientists, until the day when it was perceived, with terror, that the individual initiatives and secret vices of homunculi were definitely not those that had been expected.

  Constructed solely in accordance with scientific logic, the homunculi adapted themselves narrowly to the new world; they appeared to be better equipped for the direction of the new civilization than old-fashioned human beings.

  When their projects were revealed, there was a long period of struggle, debate, and then anguish. Some people argued that a homunculus was only a machine, at the end of the day, posing no real danger; others explained that, according to the materialist theory, there was nothing absurd in thinking that these new creatures might have the same authority and the same initiatives as a man.

  Certain suspicious occurrences, certain inexplicable assassinations, unleashed general panic; people were afraid, and no longer wasted time in debate. The homunculi were destroyed en masse. Doubts caused the scientific challenge issued by natural forces to be renounced. For weeks on end, these mysterious beings fully armed by human industry were executed.

  Some time afterwards, but too late, people asked themselves whether they might not have yielded to an impulse of unthinking fear—but no one had any regrets when, according to certain reports, they learned that several homunculi, as they died, had wept in pain and fear.

  XLIII. The Two Savages

  When one has surveyed in detail, as I have, all the centuries that follow the one that produced this book, one is literally stupefied by the extraordinary pride that the men of the 20th century took in the extremely petty progress of their nascent civilization.

  Yes, undoubtedly, at that moment, man could still have avoided great disasters and resumed, without futile detours, the idealist path that anterior civilizations had traced. He preferred, on the contrary, to deliver himself unreservedly to science, expecting everything from mechanization—and it was that insane error that led humankind to the brink of oblivion.

  If, however, one examines the situation of the human beings of the 20th century, one can easily see that their situation very closely resembled that of prehistoric humans: the same absolute ignorance of the causes of everything, the same gross fetishism, content with vain appearances, empty words and hollow definitions. Humans inhabited their bodies as foreigners, living, in the final analysis, like sheep or oxen, automatically accomplishing organic functions, submissive to their instincts, obedient to natural necessity, without any true control, without any useful influence on their destiny.

  Towards the end of the Second Scientific Era, all of that had been completely changed, I freely admit, by the veritable progress accomplished by science; a man of 1912 abruptly transported into that strange, entirely mechanized, world would have been very surprised. No more diseases, or deaths, strictly speaking, but bodies entirely reconstructed, sometimes spending long months in repair-shops; cemeteries replaced by temporary storehouses, resurrections effected routinely, according to the disposable credit of the social budget; the heavy burdens of maternity replaced by embryonic grafts carried out on animal nurses; the different utilization of the senses, their amplification, new vibrations perceived by new senses; the suppression of language, its replacement by algebraic transmission—so many things that profoundly disrupted the traditional habits of old.

  The simplification of useful movements had, moreover, brought much calm and order to the scientific world: no external noise; silent cities with very rare passers-by and without apparent conduits; everything being done by remote control, without any difficulty at all.

  It was not just the ancient pleasures of the theater that were obtainable at home, without putting oneself out, by means of simple collective suggestion. Even performances had been replaced, in the majority of cases, by simple impressions of performance giving the illusion of pleasure and success. Information, news, the announcement of important discoveries and collective recommendations were all similarly done by suggestion, without any loss of time or needless displacement.

  The sole defect of this excessive social aggregation was the gradual destruction of all individual initiative, all ambition, all independent activity—and, by virtue of the suppression of individuality, the progressive development, without anyone being aware of it, of the absolute omnipotence of the Great Central Laboratory.

  At first, this exaggerated centralization had given welcome results by constraining people conclusively to resolve social problems that had previously seemed insoluble. Thus, with ever-increasing concentration of the means of production, when there was no longer more than one factory in every region of the world, functioning automatically under the direction of a single manager, everyone had to agree that the factory could not belong solely to the heirs of the formidable trust that had constructed it. On one side, in fact, one found oneself in the presence of a sole proprietor, and, on the other, of all the consumers who, producing nothing, had no means of purchase at their disposal. From that very exaggeration of the problem, an organization almost immediately emerged for the distribution of products necessary to life.

  Unfortunately, if that admirable organization produced fortunate results for the collective satisfaction of material needs, it progressively reduced individual initiative and, by virtue of wanting to subjugate matter to their needs by means of machines, men made themselves into nothing more than simple cogs in a social machine.

  This was exaggerated to such a point that, a few years later, two savage aesthetes from God only knows where, who had avoided the progress of science, being physically constituted as people had been at the beginning of the 20th century—and, it was thought, of different sexes
—appeared in African Europe and, without the slightest effort, imposed their tyrannical will upon the scientific world for several months, without anyone being able to discover a practical means of reducing them to powerlessness.

  No mechanism had, in fact, been anticipated by the Great Central Laboratory for that sort of combat, and no individual then had a sufficiently general and flexible intelligence or a body sufficiently complete to oppose by himself the crazy enterprises of the two savages.

  The scientists of the Central Laboratory could not leave their posts without precipitating the immediate ruination of the entire world; the specialists among the common people could not seriously oppose these complete human beings. Fortunately, the two savages vanished of their own accord one day; one of them was simply heard to say to the other, employing the spoken language of old: “We’ve seen enough of them!” Then they left, without anyone being able to find out, afterwards, to which part of the world they had retired.

  It was at that moment that all the dangers of specialization began to be appreciated, and the full value of developing a complete little world within each individual. It was the dawn of a new era, in which the cultivation of the will and the exploitation of the internal forces of human being began to assume top priority. The scientists knew that that cultivation would inevitably produce unexpected and surprising results, but no one then suspected the formidable reservoir of unknown energies that the human body represented.

  XLIV. Beyond Natural Forms

  It is genuinely very difficult, in borrowing the primitive language of the 20th century, to explain in a satisfactory fashion the confusing phenomena that afflicted the final years of the Second Scientific Era and, at the same time, anticipated the Great Idealist Renaissance.