Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
Page 20
It was, very specifically, the introduction of the fourth dimension into the constitution of the human body that provoked the gravest disorder in the natural order of things. While that concept had been nothing but a simple philosophical discovery, a theory—interesting, to be sure, but solely limited to the domain of ideas—one had only to laud the enlargement that it brought to human thought. On the day when the fourth dimension entered the physical domain of quotidian life, however, unprecedented turmoil resulted on the surface of the globe.
To begin with, the advanced thinkers who had the idea were content, in their voyages of exploration, to make use of specters and phantoms, which temporarily furnished them with the supernatural bodies that they needs in order to incarnate their thought. They were thus able, without any risk, to abandon their human bodies for several days. Leaving them to tick over, and borrow spectral forms that sufficed for displacement in the fourth dimension.
Gradually, however, with the continual practice of this new sport, people began to try to adapt their own bodies to the greater demands of their thought. Why not try to bend their material envelopes to the new ideas?
Improbably, they succeeded, and irreparable disasters soon ensued.
It is, in fact, understood that the human body is constructed according to the givens of three-dimensional space. The bony frame is established according to that provisional vision of the universe; the organs are contained by the muscles and the skin in a three-dimensional space. When people tried to contort the human body to the demands of the fourth dimension, it was exposed to the most serious disorders. Without any apparent wound or visible opening, certain organs were transported outside the body and, under the natural pressure of the muscles, grouped into indescribable masses, escaping any familiar regulation and any precise anatomy.
One could not say, admittedly, that the body, thus modified, was crushed, broken or disintegrated; it continued to live, but without presenting the habitual appearance of the human body in three-dimensional space.
This terrible lesson had made a deep impression on certain scientists, who resolved no longer to expose their bodies to similar accidents and quite naturally, took advantage of domestic animals to incarnate their four-dimensional minds temporarily. Their human bodies were deposited in the Great Central Laboratory, where they were maintained in readiness, and in the meantime, our explorers took great pleasure in utilizing the bodies of unlucky animals.
In this manner, certain scientists, like the generals of old, had innumerable mounts die under them—or, at least, reduced them to the state of misshapen organisms previously unknown in three-dimensional space.
There were also people who never came back to reclaim their human bodies, and of whom nothing more was ever heard. Signs of intelligence were simultaneously observed in certain animals, and people became anxious in consequence. Might not some dog or horse wandering in the street be one of the most notorious scientists of the Great Central Laboratory?37 People in doubt had to take infinite precautions not to mistreat donkeys or geese that might be incarnating the minds of the noblest representatives of the human species.
Numerous cases of animal madness became manifest in subsequent years, and it was necessary to create a special insane asylum. No one dared try to kill these bizarre animals in fact, and people came to have the same respect for them that Oriental peoples had once had for sacred animals. Animal madness assumed the most human forms. Giraffes were observed which refused all nourishment and imagined, by night, that they were grazing the stars. Horses attained the prideful folly of spending their days moving through the fields in military formation and whinnying in a warlike manner. Dogs, eternally faithful to all the people they encountered, perished of grief in thinking of the thousands of masters they would never see again. There was much talk about an ostrich which believed that it had swallowed a celebrated scientific textbook and which dragged itself along the ground, crushed by its supposed weight. A calf, crowned with flowers, drowned itself in a pool with two springs of parsley in its nostrils.
These various divagations of scientists in animal bodies gave rise to a thousand puerile or grotesque incidents, but the Great Laboratory remained unconcerned until they began to take on an erotic character. Under the hypocritical pretext of supernatural experimentation, most people were, in fact, only borrowing these animal bodies to re-enact in an uncontrolled manner ancient procedures that were strictly forbidden, and which were only too natural.
Preparations were therefore being made to prohibit incarnations, on account of their bestial aspects, when it was realized that the greatest danger resulting from the introduction of the fourth dimension into the physical domain was, on the contrary, its excessive spirituality. As soon as the physical body, under the influence of the fourth dimension, lost its natural three-dimensional form, as soon as it became capable of spiritualizing itself in order to pass through walls or displace itself in time, it was gradually reabsorbed into the continuum, dissociating instead of disintegrating, as before—and in that new death, it was the soul that devoured the body.
The prohibition of suicide by the mind was thus announced, but it was no less obvious that, in future, the greater reality must be sought beyond natural forms, not in transitory three-dimensional appearances.
XLV. Immortality in Ideas
The Idealist Renaissance that was gradually substituted for the Second Scientific Era permitted, for the first time, clear reasoning and a glimpse of the real future of humankind.
It was astonishing, now that all ideas seemed quite simple, that they had not occurred to the human imagination sooner, and that it had required the costly and dismal experience of the Leviathan and then the long and depressing scientific domination of the Great Central Laboratory to demonstrate the insufficiency of materialistic concepts. That was doubtless because the assumptions made by science had been insufficiently clarified and their ultimate consequences had not been extrapolated.
Only one man, in the ancient era of materialism, had had the courage of his convictions and pursued it to its extreme limits, and that man was Blanqui.38 Meditating in the solitude of his cell, while he was imprisoned by governmental justice in the Fort du Taureau, he wrote a curious pamphlet entitled Éternité par les Astres, whose rigorous logic ought to have had an impact all his contemporaries.
Here, in summary, are some of the conclusions to which Blanqui’s thesis led:
The universe is infinite, but we cannot understand what such a representation means, because the notion of infinity is scarcely accessible to the human imagination. At 40 kilometers an hour, it would require 250 million years to reach the nearest stars, and the Earth, with its prodigious speed, would require 100,000 years to reach the star 61-Cygni.
Now, all that is accessible to us is the nearest part of the universe, that which is effectively part of our daily life. The immensity composed to innumerable worlds only begins, so to speak, beyond that. However, all that these worlds reveal chemically is the presence of scarcely 100 simple entities, always the same. It is with these meager 100 elements that nature must forge all the material combinations in the universe, and these combinations, although innumerable, are, by definition, mathematically limited. Inevitably, therefore, there will be solar systems analogous to ours; equally inevitably, in extrapolating this research to infinity, there will be solar systems rigorously similar to ours in the slightest detail, including Earths whose history is exactly similar to that of our Earth.39
If one does not lose sight of what the word infinity signifies and if one keeps in mind, on the other hand, that material combinations are limited by the number of simple bodies, it is impossible not to admit that, at the moment when we are writing these lines, other identical persons—counterparts or doubles—are writing the same words in other identical worlds. This is a game of mirrors that it is necessary to pursue logically to its most extreme consequences: the action that we would have performed yesterday, our other selves have performed or will perform; ev
ery possibility of our life must have been realized, or will be realized, in another world.
Let us finally add that the identity of action is not merely simultaneous; it also exists in time, in the past and in the future; it exists in every second, for it is necessary to limit ourselves, and Blanqui to the most rigorous conclusions, and to keep them to a minimum—and that is, in fact, the serious insufficiency of this theory, for, here again, it is necessary to continue to infinity the infinite fragmentation of time. In a word, we bump into infinity at the very moment when we were on the point of escaping it, and thus fall back into the eternal critique of discontinuous science formulated long ago by Zeno of Elea.40
From this scientifically exact theory, Blanqui draws rather melancholy philosophical conclusions: everything that we have personally done and everything that we will do in future, a double has already done or will do; it is the definitive negation of all ambition and all progress—but it is also the sincere conclusion at which one must arrive by pushing materialist theories to their conclusion: a sincere conclusion that would have been sufficient to demonstrate, even before the birth of the Leviathan, the radical impuissance of three-dimensional science in the presence of problems of continuous four-dimensional quality.
In that primitive era though, pushing conclusions to the extreme was reckoned to be a utopian’s game or a humorist’s joke, and no one hesitated to affirm unsmilingly that the only certainty must be sought in relativity!
A very different procedure was followed in the Great Idealist Renaissance. People attempted to research, ahead of anything else, aesthetic unity, moral originality and the absolute heterogeneity of all material support, and to get closer to the immortal and continuous type uniquely furnished by the four-dimensional mind.
It was considered that the world must be conceived, not by three-dimensional analysis, but by four-dimensional synthesis and that increasing generalization only corresponded to the legitimate aspirations of humankind.
It is, in fact, by an ever-greater centralization that ontological progress is manifest; it is by the association of ideas, by ever-more-powerful syntheses, that the human mind makes progress. That is what religions and ancient philosophies symbolized very aptly by the progressive purification of the soul passing through ever-more-elevated spheres.
The study of man from this viewpoint produces precious information. While the body, only disposed in three-dimensional space, is fatally devoted to disintegration—which is to say, to a sequence of partial or total reconfigurations—during its life and at the point of death, the human mind attains the fourth dimension and, by virtue of so doing, possesses immortality; it can envisage, in the same instant, past or future phenomena; it can elevate itself, by abstraction, above material contingencies and participate, in reality, in the universal and immutable substance of things. On the one hand, material senses furnish it with the provisional elements of an analysis of the three-dimensional world; on the other, the intimate sense, consciousness, gives it the notion of the fourth dimension—which is to say that it completes the continuous representation of the universe outside what is conventionally called space and time, vain props from which the Idea releases itself, like a completed cathedral denuded of its fragile scaffolding.
Everyone knows that in a true work of art the subject or the scenario is only a provisional sacrifice made to materiality, and that the esthetic quality of a line or an idea is entirely independent of the subject chosen. A masterpiece reveals itself to us spontaneously outside any material explanation, and all critical analysis is merely coarse afterthought. The absolute and the infinite are not materially definable, they are a priori joys that artists alone can attain.
One sees, now, how pitiful and sterile it was for the first men to pursue infinity or immortality in space or in time—which is to say, in the illusory domain of the senses. When people understood, by contrast, that infinity only existed in quality, that immortality was to be found, so to speak, on the spot, immutable and graspable by the mind in the domain of pure ideas, humankind resumed its forward march with confidence, assured of the usefulness of its task, knowing henceforth that a new idea was a creation worthy of that name, and that no double, as Blanqui thought, could rob the man-God of the idea of immortality, which had sprung fully-armed from his brain.
Death for the body is nothing but the end of a physical oscillation that is called life; for the mind, it is nothing but the end of a mental hesitation that is called thought. Death is, in a word, nothing but the end of a contradiction, provisionally useful for the search for the truth, but which becomes pointless when that verity is attained.
Only in the Age of the Golden Eagle was it understood that, outside of any idea of progress in time, this total verity could be attained by an act of faith, intelligence or love, and that such an act, instead of having a relative value—a social value as in the three-dimensional world—always acquires an absolute value in the world of ideas. In the physical domain, in fact, the murder of a man is, for instance, more serious than that of an insect; in the moral domain, on the contrary, only the desire to commit murder is important, and its gravity remains immutable in relation to the mind that conceives it.
Similarly, in the three-dimensional world, a new contradiction, an idea of genius, dazzles humankind by the incalculable social consequences that it might have; in the purely intellectual domain, on the contrary, the most timid movement of a solitary and sincere heart towards infinity is often worth more than a flash of intelligence; the value is measured by its innate quality and not by its quantity, and it is for that reason that the humblest are sometimes closer to immortality than the greatest.
Immortality, it was understood in the Age of the Golden Eagle, is potentially attainable at any moment by a thought released from the three-dimensional world, escaping thereby from the illusions of time and space. One divines, without it being necessary to insist, that it was rarely attained during the long period of scientific tyranny that preceded the Great Idealist Renaissance.
XLVI. The Stations of Infinity
As might be imagined, the Great Idealist Renaissance did not come about instantaneously following the long scientific era that had succeeded the 20th century.
For years, men had got into the habit of obeying the orders of the Great Central Laboratory; social life had been entirely mechanized, down to the last detail, and the new idealist tendencies, understandably, could not reform such deeply-rooted mores in a matter of hours.
The various checks suffered by the Absolute Savants of the Great Central Laboratory had proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were others things in the world than numbers and quantities, and that science was quite insufficient to satisfy all human aspirations. It had proved possible, without much effort, to prolong life, to grow and nourish fractions of the human body separately, to attach them to other living beings; it had even proved possible to communicate animal life to plants and vice versa—but it had never been possible to create life.
Several times, undoubtedly, someone had imagined that the creation in question had finally been obtained, but they had always discovered, eventually, that the life was pre-existent, even in simple bodies. As for materialist theories, their insufficiency had been demonstrated on the day when someone had had the courage to push them to their final consequences and their impuissance was particularly marked when the attempt had been made by their means, to touch upon the great questions of immortality and infinity.
To limit nature to a certain number of simple bodies, always the same, combining them in various fashions, to infinity, was to recognize fatally, developing the ideas of Blanqui, the inevitable existence of identical combinations distributed throughout the universe. From that, as we have said, combinations being limited in number, it is necessary to admit that by continually searching, one must find an Earth identical to ours, other Earths where individuals identical to us will do what we have done, or what we might have wanted to do—and not only once, but an infinite numb
er of times. And that, better than any other demonstration, suffices to prove that materialist combinations are incapable of taking account of the very nature of things.41
One understands very quickly, therefore, that it is not in material combinations that it is necessary to pursue the quest for the infinite but, quite to the contrary, on the spot, within ourselves, by an ever-greater increase in our intellectual faculties and an ever-more active research of pure ideas.
Time and movement are, in fact, only purely relative expressions, and the quality of life is quite independent of its duration. A nebula takes millions of years to coalesce; a scientist can imagine that agglomeration in a moment of reflection so brief that no human instrument can measure it.
Furthermore, in the life of a man of genius, truly useful, generative ideas only take a moment of reflection so brief that it escapes all measurement, and the rest of such a life is merely devoted to the popularization of that idea of genius. Similarly, a violent shock, a threat of danger, and imminent death, can endow the brain with more activity and more memory in a few seconds than interminable years of banal life could contrive. Given this, the duration of a life hardly matters, so long as one succeeds in prodigiously increasing the faculty of thought. Patient researches were undertaken in this direction, but they were, unfortunately, quickly compromised by scientific methods of which it was very difficult to get rid at the beginning of the Great Idealist Renaissance.
Laboratories of an entirely new kind were, therefore, soon created, in which willing volunteers attempted to depart for infinity as people had once departed on long voyages. They were, properly speaking, new stations that the civilizations of old had never anticipated, from which people departed on a daily basis on journeys inside themselves. Innumerable precautions were taken to ensure the safety of these strange voyages made on the spot, whose goal was to escape, to the greatest possible extent, the ancestral exigencies of time and space.