Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  It was from the body, a burdensome accessory, that all the ancient ideas of relativity came; it was from that mass of sleeping cells that it was necessary to be released as quickly as possible, and the first step that was taken was to isolate, without any danger to life, not only the central cells that represented the personality of each voyager, but also the very essence of those cells.

  The voyager was prepared, for a month, for that instantaneous voyage by means of philosophical readings and artistic visions of increasing purity. The education of the will commenced with an analysis of Plato’s Parmenides, and terminated in purely musical sensations, mathematical music permitting more complete syntheses than the other arts and evoking the maximum of possible memories. In that sense, the new stations of infinity were slightly reminiscent of the theaters of barbaric times.

  The first results thus obtained were fairly satisfactory. In a few seconds, the voyagers could often access, not only almost all the present ideas, but also, in the same instant, the past ideas accumulated in the living cell since the origin of the world—but that was all. Their rapidity of thought had increased in incalculable proportions, but they were not united, as had initially been hoped, with the infinite—which is to say, with the universality of things.

  Between the three dimensions of phenomena registered by the senses and the fourth dimension, suggested by consciousness, man remained suspended mid-way, enclosed in a personality conclusively abstracted from any idea of time and space. The voyager no longer situated infinity, as before, outside himself, no longer exteriorizing it in a gross fashion in the form of some sort of divinity; infinity was located within him, where his consciousness had formerly been situated.

  It was understood then that the stations that had been constructed for departure on the quest for infinity were, at the end of the day, only coarse scientific establishments analogous to those that might have been conceived a few years earlier by the Absolute Savants of the Great Central Laboratory.

  Fortunately, after this deceptive hitch, another way, clearer and more luminous, opened up for the Great Idealist Renaissance—and that way was prepared in an unexpected fashion by the discovery that was made, at the same time, of resurrection. Men who had been dead a few days before, had been successfully resuscitated, returning for the fist time to tell the frightful story of the moral tortures they had endured during the time when their spirits had found themselves permanently separated from their bodies.

  Conscious, exactly as they had been before their deaths, they had experienced the frightful regret of wandering amid the people who had been dear to them, witnessing their grief without being able to console them, without being able to let them know that they were beside them. These men had understood that only one truly superior idea existed in the world, capable of clarifying all others, and that this pure idea was love.

  This was not a matter, of course, of love such as it was understood in the barbaric centuries, but of that universal sympathy capable of uniting all living beings in a narrow sense, which would develop in incalculable proportions if the living were able to comprehend the frightful isolation of death and which would permit the accomplishment, in a single moment of common enthusiasm, of progress that centuries of timid and suspicious civilization had not been able to effect.42

  For the first time, thanks to these new notions, the Great Idealist Renaissance began to understand that infinity could not be discovered by the mind, but by the heart. The attempt successively to attain all the ideas in the universe could only fail miserable. On the contrary, in mingling all beings in the same common love, infinity would come to us. It was no more than a unique and individual creative act, uniting in an instant what all the reasoning in the world had been unable to summarize. Universal love was hope perennially renewed, the communal forward march of all beings, the supreme and definitive synthesis forever opposed to the hostile and solvent analysis of science.

  These were, at first, only vague and imprecise ideas, but they soon developed to find their full justification in the Age of the Golden Eagle.

  XLVII. The House of Bodies

  Although it has always been very difficult for me to estimate years with precision in the course of my journeys to the land of the fourth dimension, I think I can affirm that it was exactly 2000 years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that the Great Idealist Renaissance abolished mechanical slavery and proclaimed the Rights of Matter and Nature. It had required centuries of civilization and crude scientific labor for that idea, simple as it was, to succeed in making itself manifest.

  When one has traversed the centuries to arrive in the Age of the Golden Eagle, one cannot comprehend that humans had needed to subjugate matter for so many years and to surround themselves with mechanical slaves, just as people in the 20th century could not accept the human slavery of times past—and yet, it has to be said, that liberation could only be achieved after centuries of preparation and progress.

  In abolishing slavery, moreover, the Great Idealist Renaissance was only following and completing the same movement towards liberty that had been in development since the origins of the world, but which the sociologists had been unable to recognize or appreciate in full. Particularly in the 20th century, at the beginning of the Scientific Era, work had been blithely glorified in a ridiculous fashion. Without realizing it, people had confused the free activity of the human mind, from which all its glory stems, and forced labor rudely imposed by the necessities of the material body—and, by extension, the social body. And yet, it had already been evident for a long time that that frenetic and unhealthy glorification of social work was in contradiction with the most legitimate aspirations of humankind—that it conflicted brutally with the highest ideals of thinkers of genius as well as the basest desires of the crowd.

  An attentive examination of past civilizations had sufficed, however, to reveal that humans, since the remotest times, had done all they could to obtain, not the right to work, but the right to leisure; that they had tried, in every fashion imaginable—by means of force, toil or dreams—to escape, as much as possible, from the material exigencies of life.

  Asiatic potentates, conquerors and lords of every species had constructed society in the unique hope of obtaining for themselves the necessary tranquility to develop their minds, and when the great ancient republics were founded, their first concern had been to ensure the leisure of the all-powerful kings who were their citizens. Thus, in Athens, the enviable rank of citizen was limited in its numbers, each place corresponding to an assured source of State revenue. Three slaves worked in the mines for every citizen, and Xenophon proposed the creation at Piraeus of a hostelry for foreigners whose revenues would augment those of Athenian citizens. Rome similarly levied tributes from the entire world. After the fall of the Gracchi, the Roman Senate had undertaken, as Pericles had before, to protect the life of citizens. The colossal exploitation of the world served to liberate the citizen-kings from all material preoccupation.

  In all times, this formidable example was followed. By means of slavery, by the abuse of force or moral authority, the best endowed men always attempted to free themselves from the material labor necessary to life in order to devote themselves entirely, according to their aptitudes, either to sloth, to crude bodily toil accomplished in play or to intellectual research—the only sources of pleasure. The weakest took refuge in superstition, sleep or alcohol.

  With the progress of science, people naturally thought it appropriate to substitute mechanical slavery for human slavery, and to transfer the forced labor previously imposed on men to inert matter. That transformation, already foreseen in antiquity by Aristotle, was only a displacement of the same principle: people still living at the expense of the environment, subjugating the natural forces the surrounded them, destroying in order to live.

  During the Scientific Era, people blithely imagined that the world had changed, but they were only imitating ancient methods; at the very most, an authentic progress in
ideas had made it clearly understood that material work ought not to take first place in the preoccupations of humankind, that it was nothing but the ransom of inferior obligations, and that its sole utility was to procure the leisure necessary to the development of human thought. They were so enraptured by the new machines, though, and by the discoveries of the Great Central Laboratory that they often forgot that the mechanical slaves were, for humankind, a means of liberation and not an end.

  When the Great Idealist Renaissance arrived, it was finally understood, on the contrary, that excessive mechanization was a heavy intellectual burden and that human progress would consist of a gradual reduction of this over-cumbersome mechanical personnel. As the notion of the fourth dimension became common to all men, as the mind became gradually accustomed to liberating itself from the body and traveling freely at whim, the utility of machines conceived solely for the needs of the material body diminished in astonishing proportions.

  Already, thanks to progress, the old processes of alimentation no longer existed and the nutrition of cells was effected electrically by simple diathermic currents. Thanks to the displacement of the immaterial four-dimensional mind, means of transport were unnecessary. As defenses against bad weather and hiding-places the habitations of old were similarly unnecessary. It was sufficient to shelter the material body, and for that purpose an immense city was constructed, called the House of Bodies. As for the ancient symbolism of spoken language, books and works of art, that too became unnecessary with the transmission of thought, much more rapid and complete than the crude hieroglyphic languages of past centuries, which used words to imitate ideas.

  Except for the House of Bodies, therefore—the last vestige of the material necessities of old—our world, in the time of the Great Idealist Renaissance, gradually resumed the appearance that it must have had in prehistoric times—and I admit that, during my first journeys to that very remote future era, I naively imagined that I had returned, without realizing it, to the primitive ages of the Earth when humankind did not yet exist.

  It was only then that people understood the extent to which the obscure impressions of the naïve poets of old who called themselves lovers of nature—who found as much joy and emotion in inanimate objects as in the characters of novels and who discovered more sincere and true humanity in landscapes than the hypocritical lies of human language—had been justified, in spite of their imprecision.

  Nature and matter, definitively freed from their slavery, resumed all their glorious expansion in the time of the Great Idealist Renaissance—and if, for the civilizations of old—the human race might have seemed to have died forever in the great House of Bodies, for those who knew and understood, it was only then that it established its definitive reign and blended itself forever in the universal soul of things.43

  Let here be no mistake about it, though: this new state of nature had no relationship, however distant, to the infantile return to primitive mores prescribed by the tender utopians or anarchistic ascetics of old; it represented, on the contrary, the ultimate progress of a transcendental science, the coronation of the patient and laborious effort that the genius of man had pursued obscurely for thousands of years.

  After the false departure of the Leviathan, a premature materialist caricature of a spiritual union that only the Golden Eagle could realize in the fourth dimension, the First Scientific Era had, it will be remembered, exalted and developed mechanization to the point of subjugating the individual to his own slaves. In the Second Scientific Era, progress having been of a much higher order, all that obsessive mechanism tended towards simplification, then disappeared. Minuscule items of apparatus, utilizing formidable natural forces, sufficed to supply the needs of millions of people. Everything was accomplished in silence, in an invisible manner, at the behest of human will-power, by means of influences and radiations—and, in that universe mechanized to an extreme at which one no longer saw the machines, thanks were rendered to the men of old who, for centuries, had lived in a mechanical inferno to prepare a future that they could not even discern: no more transmissions, no more wires, no more rails, no more ships or aircraft, no more apparent monuments raised by human hands, but the immense forests of old, the terrestrial paradise of legend, haunted invisibly by millions of men communicating with one another mentally, consumed by a spiritual activity inaccessible to our understanding and comprised, for each one, by the thought of all.

  At the most, in the era of the Great Idealist Renaissance, men resumed their corporeal bodies for a few hours every year, as if putting on their working clothes, in order to fulfill a social obligation. The human race, thanks to the patient scientific labor of past centuries, had tamed nature and abandoned itself to the active mental leisure glimpsed by antique civilizations.

  XLVIII. The Golden Eagle

  As I have already explained, the Great Idealist Renaissance overturned all the old ideas about death, infinity and immortality. It was understood that, far from being a quest for the absolute, human intelligence was, in sum, only a simple reflection of that absolute, seeking itself, as in a mirror, in the fragmentary and provisional contradictions of time and space.

  It was understood that the entire history of progress, since the origins of the world, was there, and that the Spirit, the sole creator, had projected, wholly within itself, the world as we knew it. That Spirit, quite naturally, had not revealed itself at first in the image of human intelligence, but it was always the same thing that presided over chemical differentiations and then the biological development of the natural forms of every creature.

  That was an idea so very different from ancient ideas, a conception that so profoundly overturned human existence, that the men of that time were the only ones able to grasp it—and one can only smile, it must be said, in thinking about the preoccupation with survival, the folly of corporeal immortality, that possessed the men of the early ages of the Earth.

  That first phase of the Idealist Renaissance was designated in a rather curious fashion, which demands a few words of explanation: it was called the Age of the Golden Eagle, or sometimes, more familiarly, that of the Golden Bird. This was intended to recall the instinctive and rather naïve belief of the metaphysicians of old who imagined that every human action had a corresponding intellectual double and that every grouping of ideas must be represented somewhere by a real being, which they called the Golden Eagle. It was moreover, of that supernatural creature that the ancient alchemists made use when they wanted to exercise some action at a particular point on the globe. Instead, for example, of converting all the inhabitants of a town by preaching, it was sufficient to act upon the Golden Eagle that represented the town for that action to be felt by all the individuals that epitomized the single personality of the supernatural being.

  The Golden Eagle of the Great Idealist Renaissance, properly understood, was that which had been called Love in many centuries of primitive civilization: not material love in its generic sense but the expansive and profound sentiment, the desire for submission of the individual to universal beauty, that gives love all its grandeur.

  When one looks back over the naïve beliefs of past eras regarding love, and when one thinks of the observations that psychologists were able to make on a daily basis, one cannot help experiencing some astonishment in thinking that its divine mystery was so long hidden from human beings. It was easy for them, however, to observe how weak and contradictory the link was that united a petty physiological function with the formidable idea that was conceived of it. For want of the ability to apply the violent instinct that he had within him to objects other than animal passions, man had accustomed himself to find all the nonsense and absurdities that such a contradictory problem could present quite plausible.

  It would have been possible to observe 100 times a day, though, that the intellectual passion had no relationship with the physiological function; poets and thinkers had certainly sensed, obscurely, that the greater an amorous passion became the more distanced it became from
its material realization. They were even able to affirm that the most sublime terrestrial amours were often those that remained free of materiality, whether they were made in reality, like that of Dante and Beatrice, in a poetic dream, like that of Tristan and Iseult, or in the mystical passion of believers. It was equally possible to observe, since the time of Ovid, and even before him, the aberration of a madly amorous mind and the manner in which it was capable of mistaking the real merits of the person beloved, imagining virtues in accordance with physical charms.

  Evidently, human beings, since the beginning of the world, were in pursuit of a dazzling ideal that they themselves had created, often in fragmentary form, and which they felt the need to materialize in the only way they knew, whatever frightful disillusionments that realization had in store for them.

  Some poets and novelists had certainly dreamed of transposing the love of women into that of humanity entire, preaching universal fraternity and love of one’s neighbor, but they were the vague formulas of thinkers, which could not correspond to any reality in a three-dimensional world, and it had proved more convenient to affirm that all great artistic or humanitarian passions were nothing, in the final analysis, but sexual perversions.

  It was the clear and profound revelation of the fourth dimension that finally permitted humankind to find the way for which it had been obscurely searching for centuries, and definitively to resolve the most irreducible antinomies. Until that day, in fact, certain notions had appeared to be utterly irreconcilable. If ideas were real, if matter was nothing but pure phantasmagoria, if unity, by definition, escaped all modality, what, after all, was matter? What was the phenomenal world that opposed itself to the absolute like the Evil Genius of legend locked in combat with God?