Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  The fourth dimension, on the contrary, permitted man to anticipate events outside time and, in preparing the causes, to exercise choice, varying the actions in every case according to his whim. For the sense of the fourth dimension advances ahead of man; it is what is called the sense of the future in a world of three dimensions; it is the creative Idea existing qualitatively outside Time and permitting the human mind to explore all the epochs of the world in the present.

  If the subconscious appears to us unfathomable and immense, it is because it is nothing but the Unique Universal Consciousness and because, by its means, we can reunite all the ages and all the consciousnesses of the world—those that we call yesterday, today and tomorrow—immobile and immutable, behind the moving mirage of the phenomenal world.

  LI. The Secret of the Atom

  In concluding the transcription of these notes taken in the course of my journeys to the land of the fourth dimension, I want to try, for the benefit of the men of the 20th century, briefly to unveil the mystery that still separates them from future times—or, to put it better, superior ages.

  I know that, instead of writing this novel of ideas, I could have contented myself with a brief philosophical summary that would have had more prestige among the specialists of a scientific era. Unfortunately, as we shall see further on, if the great philosophers of times past had only ever ended up with decidedly relative conclusions, their thought would have remained permanently imprisoned in three-dimensional mathematical hypotheses. I have therefore thought it preferable to follow the literary path, which permits, by means of its images and symbols, an approximation of continuous reality instead of a collision with the algebraic division of words, and to attempt a synthesis of all the ways of knowing, from which no mental initiative would be excluded—especially the most extravagant. I should add, finally, that a preliminary enlargement of the mind appears to me to be indispensable before touching fruitfully on fundamental realities that remain inaccessible if one does not liberate oneself progressively from the prejudices of space and time.

  When we examine our “established certainties” we observe that they only exist in relation to a contrary whose measure is unknown.

  In the mental domain, humor, which is the internal sense of a necessary contrary, reveals to us the relativity of our certainties with respect to the absolute.

  In the mathematical domain, the flexible theories of relativity only extend between two infinities, and it is never possible to pass, according to Zeno of Elea, from extreme divisibility to the indivisible continuum. Matter, life, thought, movement, space and time can never be conceived in finite unities without being functions of an infinity.

  Now, in order to avoid mistakes: that infinity is not a purely theoretical external hypothesis, as people affect to believe; it is an inherent condition of the finite, to the point that one can say without absurdity, in the language of three-dimensional space, that infinity is always necessarily contained in the finite.

  It is, therefore, as if a supplementary dimension must be added in every circumstance to our relative three-dimensional concepts in order to integrate them into the real Unity, and it is that supplementary value, representing the contrary or the infinite, that we have called the fourth dimension, for want of a possible expression in three-dimensional language.

  In reality, this fourth qualitative dimension, escaping all prejudices of space and time, absorbs rather than completing the quantitative dimensions; it is merely a passage from divisible matter to indivisible Unity. It is not a dimension, properly speaking, but the provisional idea that we form of that which our world lacks in order to reintegrate its Unity. This is so true that it “adds itself” as easily to the unique dimension of a curve as to the two dimensions of a circle, curve and circle being the pure esthetic qualities inaccessible to geometrical divisibility. From that, moreover, arises the absurdity of the would-be squarers of the circle who, like seekers of perpetual movement, attempt to reduce the indivisible continuum to finite quantities.

  The fourth dimension being merely a necessary passage from the fragmentary to the continuous, a mental voyage from the relative to the absolute, from the divisible to the indivisible—in a word, from the multiple to the unique—one definitive question arises: What is Unity?

  One can conceive of it a priori in terms of the divine, but that is merely to beg the question, a further acknowledgement of the eternal dualism, irreducible in its various aspects, between God and the world, soul and body, spirit and matter. For if we agree with Pythagoras and Heraclitus that all truth is in the Unique—of which other entities are only formal appearances—it is impossible for us, without the aid of the fourth dimension and the principles of relativity revealed in the 20th century, not to oppose the phenomenal world of three dimensions to the Unity, or, if we want to fuse them, not to suppress the phenomenal world in the process as something inconceivable, deprived of all utility, since everything exists in a complete and perfect fashion in the divine unity. It was for this reason that, in ancient philosophy, absolute materialism led to the denial of the Idea and logical idealism to depriving living beings and things of all personality—an antagonism inevitable while the scientific prejudice of space and time persisted.

  Deprived of the ability to redescend from Heaven to Earth, it thus appeared more logical, in the earliest phases of human thought, to start from where we are and go back from the complex to the simple to discover the primitive element of whose innumerable forms, it was thought, the world was composed. By progressively dividing matter up, it seemed, we ought to discover the indivisible primitive element; the Atom—a magnificent but redoubtable name. For the atom, having become, from the moment of its birth, the property of theorists of divisibility—which is to say, scientists—found itself materially divisible after Democritus, since it possessed extent, remaining no less measurable for the theorists of the 20th century. The latter, no longer seeing anything in the atom but a mass dependant on speed, undoubtedly idealized matter but—by the same token, and with reason—removed all substantial reality from it, leaving it solely accessible to quantitative calculations bounded by infinity. We are, remember, now only talking about the atom of the chemists and physicists: a complex composite; a veritable miniature solar system, no longer having any relationship with either the name or the idea of the atom.

  Among the philosophers the conception of the primitive element was immediately elevated, thanks to Pythagoras, to the supreme unity, the only unity: the Monad—also a magnificent name, but even more redoubtable to bear than that of the atom. For, while it was necessary, according to the honest and luminous genius of Leibnitz, that the monad alone took account of the whole universe, we had the truly hallucinatory surprise of seeing that monad, that unique “which contains the entire world in its coils,” multiplied in infinite number to follow the infinite division of matter. Although the monad had the singular advantage over the atom of being an unextended formal atom, it did not escape the scientific mirage of the three-dimensional world, which leads us to see at the bottom over every phenomenon, not a unity always the same—which is the truth—but as many total unities as there are phenomena, which is to say, an infinity, which is absurd. Provided with all the qualities of the unique, containing within it the entire history of the universe, prototype of composites, moving without doors or windows solely in quality, engendering those moments of the mind that are bodies, reducing even time and space to the logical order of reasoning, the monad of Leibnitz ran aground in the multiplicity of the unique and in the miracle of pre-established harmony, which made, for instance, words and thought coincide.

  When one has traveled the great circular road of the Fourth Dimension to attain a clear vision of the unique Unity, all these genius steps of human thought, moving as they are by virtue of the fashion in which they often disturb the veil of mystery, appear rather disconcerting in sum. When, in fact, in the three-dimensional world, we consider the same statue from 100 different angles, the idea never
occurs to us to believe in the existence of 100 actual statues. In the same way, in the four-dimensional world, the idea never occurs to us to attribute a distinct substantial reality to each of the three aspects of the unique substance.

  THE ATOM IS UNIQUE. There is, in the universe as we know it, but one single atom; or, if one prefers—the two words being equivalent in their absolute sense—but one single monad. The great secret of the UNICITY OF THE ATOM,45 unintelligible without the aid of the fourth dimension, summarizes within itself all the enigmas of the world, posed 100 times over in the course of the centuries, never resolved and always more impenetrable, by the very reason of the progress of Science. Its revelation in the Age of the Golden Eagle was, for the human mind, like a flash of enlightenment, but it is more difficult of access for men of the 20th century, blinded as they are by the quantitative prejudice of the infinitely small—although no real grandeur exists but in quality—and by the puerile mathematical artifice of the unique unity being infinitely divisible into as many unique unities as there are phenomena.

  For want of expressions in three-dimensional language, let us simply say that it is as if the unique Monad, unextended, without doors or windows, were sufficiently great to contain within itself all the phenomena of the Universe, which are only thoughts and associations of ideas imagined in a logical order of reasoning that we call time and space. It is because they have become accustomed, over centuries, to the convenient scientific hypothesis of divisibility—compensated by that of infinity—that men have believed for so long in a substantial reality appropriate to each phenomenon, although each phenomenon is nothing but a distinct idea of the same unique Consciousness. And one remains confused in observing that the greatest of metaphysicians, Leibnitz, after having given his Monad all the inevitable and evident characteristics of universality and unicity in pure quality, outside time and space, lost himself lamentably in the naturally infinite multiplicity of the unique atom, to remain, in spite of everything, imprisoned in the scientific prejudices of the relative world of three dimensions.

  Subjectively, the unique atom is known as our consciousness with respect to all our immediate perceptions and the subconscious with respect to the values escaping our field of distinct perception. In reality, THERE IS BUT ONE CONSCIOUSNESS or unique atom, comprising in quality the whole universe. Our pretended individual consciousnesses are, like living beings and things, only momentary ideas and associations of ideas of the unique Consciousness. Because our relative consciousness symbolizes in accordance with the absolute consciousness, we may say that everything happens in the universal consciousness as it does in our own minds and that, in short, metaphysics ought to be fused with psychology.

  There is, therefore, nothing external, superior or miraculous outside of us, for our intellectual life is the very life of the universe, and its expression the very highest.

  If our thoughts, thanks to their contradictions, are the most fecund and the most elevated of the Universal Consciousness, it does not follow that they are the only ones. The principles, the fixed ideas—the reflexes, one might rather say—of the Universal Consciousness are personified by matter; from that comes the permanence of physical laws, a permanence entirely apparent and relative, since time and space are only modes of expression of thought, incapable of distinct substantial reality. Everything is contained within the unique Consciousness, everything moves relatively to the same rhythm, without any necessity for pre-established harmony; a second may be longer than 1000 years if it is greater in quality, without anything indicating that it is, and without it even being so, since quality alone is real.

  Certain thoughts engendered by an encounter of ideas in the Universal Consciousness, outside time and space, can similarly appear fortuitously in minds that perceive them passively, from which come premonitions of the future and visions at a distance. Equally passive are the materializations of ideas that are called monsters and the actions of nightmare figures developing their character independently of our will and in contradiction to it. We do not always do exactly what we intend and our ideas are linked to innumerable other ideas of the unique Consciousness; make no mistake, though: the unicity of the Universal Consciousness suppresses neither our personality nor our free will—entirely to the contrary, as we shall see.

  The unicity of the ATOM, CONSCIOUSNESS or LIFE are so many different ways of envisaging the same unique substantial reality. The human personality germinates in the Universal Consciousness in exactly the same way that an idea develops in the human mind or a seed in the soil. Life—which is to say, character—once given, development belongs to the new “relationship of ideas” that is the created being. It is not by gathering a bouquet that one creates a living being, but by planting a seed.

  The human personality is the free development of an initially-determined character in contact with neighboring personalities. Its field is love—which is to say, the union of all personalities in the communal consciousness. Its mission is the contradiction that accentuates characters—which is to say, the differences in which the unique Thought lives. To borrow the ancient symbolic language: man is freer than God; he is His superior, as the work of art is to the author, since it is more complete than he is in the relevant particular. For God is not All, since He seeks to realize himself and, without the creations that are His thoughts, he would remain as non-existent as the human mind would be without thought. The world, in the Universal Consciousness, is, in this sense, here a relative certainty (physical laws), there a contradiction (human works), and one might say that the human personality is God’s sense of humor.

  Perfect and homogeneous agreement would be a moment of death for the Universal Consciousness whose life is composed of thoughts—which is to say, of contradictions—for, if contradiction ceased within itself, the contrary would have to be outside. By the same token, the Universal Consciousness would cease to be the Unique Being, it would no longer be anything but one of the ideas of a higher Unique, completely inaccessible to our understanding…and so on, to infinity: a simple game of mathematical mirrors that we cannot admit into the real domain of pure quality.

  How can we know what is happening in the unique Consciousness of which our personalities are only thoughts, freely blooming in contact with other thoughts, like a plant in its environment? Quite simply by examining what is happening in our own minds. In the same way that there are good and evil thoughts within our minds, miserable thoughts that eliminate themselves in a final judgment and sublime thoughts that will overshadow the others forever, so our personalities are distinct in quality and in vigor within the Communal Consciousness, but all are equally free to persevere in their being, until they attain their ultimate consequences. Just as, in literary composition, an author is no longer able to bend the actions of a character whose nature he has determined to his whim without depriving him of life, so the Universal Consciousness can no longer bend to its whim the thinking being that it has created and which henceforth acts within it and for it, for better or worse.

  We are, therefore, in reality, characters in a novel invented by the unique Artist, but the organic growth of his work depends on our character, our style and our interaction with the rest of the World. In that capacity alone can we become aspects of the Universal Consciousness, immutable components of its Work of Art.

  From that, undoubtedly, stems the eternal success of literary fictions, which symbolize, without being aware of it, the Life of the universe. From that stems the sense more profound than we think, of that great imagined comedy that we call the Comedy of Life.

  As Psychology contains the knowledge of the Unique—and is superior to it, as the knowledge of the Work is of a more elevated order than the knowledge of the author—it is now appropriate to ask ourselves what Science is.

  When we set out for the land of the fourth dimension, Science appeared to us, justly, to be open to criticism, for it aspired to impose itself on the only real and complete certainty, superior to man and subjugating him. But since
we have attained the sole Unique and Continuous Reality and, beginning from that reality, have followed the development of thought as it invents the world and, more particularly, each character from which human Personality emerges, our point of view has been inverted. The individual, seen as superior to the Unity, has regained control and Science appears to us as his most subtle servant, as a purely speculative method of analytical abstraction, permitting understanding but not creating, which remains the most personal and the most original hypothesis of the human personality. And three-dimensional vision, so puerile when one imagines that it attains continuous reality, becomes an analytical method of genius, which, by hypothetically removing one pawn from the crowded chessboard that is the Unique Consciousness, permits all the others to move.

  Mathematical divisibility is, therefore, a metaphysical hypothesis indispensable to analytical reasoning, but psychology alone permits us to attain the physical reality of the world: creation and life.

  Epilogue

  Why have I returned from that dazzling land of the fourth dimension, from those distant and yet present eras in which the intelligence of things is complete? To begin with, I admit, sadly, it was a base sensation of material anxiety that advised me to abandon these journeys; after that, there was a more noble and more precise sentiment of a moral duty that enjoined me to resume a projected work of art: a personal creation uniquely capable of permanently capturing the fugitive grace of a movement, the spark of a thought—which is to say, a new aspect of the Unique Idea, revealed to the world for the first time.

  It is, therefore, to this book that I have returned instinctively, and that alone has always indicated to me, in an irrefutable fashion, the location at which I ought to act within the universal order of things. I have returned to my work because I felt the imperious need to remind men that the false certainty of science is deceptive, and that the immense mystery they imagine around them is created every day, uniquely within them and by them.