One always returns to one’s faith or one’s work, and the fervent artist is very similar to the humble believer. There is but One Reality and if death can dispel the vain illusion of the three-dimensional body, it can no longer reach those who have glimpsed, if only for an instant, the immortal four-dimensional Idea and the creation of pure Forms beyond space of time.
I have returned irresistibly to this book, because, although the hypothesis of three dimensions leads only to the mundane world, the complete four-dimensional intelligence becomes death-like if it does not if it does not do battle in contradiction, and if love does not develop in the struggle. I have returned, because Prometheus’ chains are always a finer burden than triumphant fire. “When you were born,” the great poet Saadi46 wrote, “you wept and everyone around you was laughing; make sure when you die that you are laughing and everyone else is weeping.” Our double duty is contained in these words.
We must act with discretion and generosity, for we know now that everything that surrounds us is really part of us, and that in hurting others it is ourselves that we hurt. But if love is, in consequence, the most sublime form of egoism, egoism is, by the same token, the most elevated form of love, for it is in demanding everything of ourselves that we best serve others. Above all else, therefore, wherever chance has placed us, we must elevate our personality to superhumanity with honor and courage, and release it from three-dimensional prejudices. We know that we have nothing more to expect from the Author that creates individuals, while the Author expects everything of us, who are creating the Work of Art by living it.
All mystery is henceforth in us, all imagination superior to the universal consciousness, good or evil, solely dependent on our will. Sole inventors of the world, we live in a magnificent fairyland in which the humblest objects are thoughts and the greatest individuals are souls.
Since the consciousness of the world is within us, let us learn how to laugh at appearances; let us learn, above all else, how to conduct ourselves internally like immortal heroes, and no longer as men.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
(Used as a Preface to the 1923 Edition)
The need to prepare a definitive edition.
From the beginning of 1895, when I wrote my first story about the exploration of time, until 1912, when the first edition of this volume appeared, the Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension remained, for me, in perpetual development: published in fragments according to the intuitions of the moment, taken up again, revised and then completed, its publication as a whole did not put an end to the work that my mind devoted to it, to the extent that it seemed difficult, in certain respects, not to talk about it exclusively at every opportunity.
The majority of books, once published, detach themselves from the author in a process of birth and become stranger to him than they are to the eventual reader. This book, by contrast, remained present in my everyday life, a passionate but ever-fleeting reflection of those marvels with which enlightenment dazzles us if we have the courage to leap forward instead of remaining crouched tremulously on the edge of that abyss which seems, as on ancient maps, forever to limit the known world of our ancestors.
I had eventually to decide, though, to release a definitive edition of Journey to the Fourth Dimension, present fashions no longer permitting one to spend nearly 30 years thinking about what one might write. I did not wish to do so, however, without adding a preliminary critical analysis of the book, which will, I believe—by explaining its inclinations and revealing the genesis of its ideas—allow it to be read with greater pleasure and fruitfulness.
Manifestly Anti-Naturalist, this book is a Novel of Ideas.
Manifestly anti-naturalist—for nothing human exists outside the realm of artifice, a product of passionate Belief in the unique and total creative power of the Idea—this book was, in its origin, an attempted escape from bourgeois certainty, a revolutionary protest against the scientific tyranny of the moment. It was, above all, an attempt to write a novel in which the principal character would no longer be a human being but an Idea, a novel whose plot would unfold in the realm of Thought and whose adventures would consist of the modifications of its character.
These modifications of character are forms of style, passing reflections in the same mirror, fugitive impressions from various angles. If, in fact, style—which is to say, the character, the intrinsic movement and the life of a mind—is necessarily one and indivisible, all the possible forms of human thought, serious or frivolous, instinctive or experimental, must be permitted to it, however contradictory they may be and by the very reason of their fecund contradictions; for, as all creators know, only the coupling of male and female ideas can engender life.
The first chapters imagine a new aspect of the World.
The first chapters of Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension are specifically designed to subvert the received order of our reasoning, to open up the possibilities of a new way of thinking by modifying the situation of the observer relative to that which he observes. Now, in the domain of the Idea, whoever says “possibility” also says “realization.”
Everything imaginable exists.
Affirmation cannot be conceived without Negation.
It seems evident to me, contrary to current opinion, that everything imagined exists, purely by virtue of being imagined, and that this existence has a reality other than that of so-called realities. A material realization is nothing but a partial death, a caricatural crystallization of an Idea. The Idea, on the other hand, is replete with infinite possibilities and its certainty derives precisely from the fact that it emanates from the only absolute certainty that we have in the world: our thought.
To take a simple example, how paltry is the realization of aircraft by comparison with the general presentiment that has obsessed humankind since earliest times: liberation from the force of gravitation; levitation, perhaps by virtue of will-power alone?
In a more abstract sense, are not the negation and inversion of all admitted natural laws as indispensable to the existence of those laws as flux is to reflux, shadow to light, aspiration to respiration and falsehood to truth?
Without death, life would have no more meaning to humans than to stones; without that which we call Evil, that which we call Good would no more exist in us than in natural phenomena; every thought and thing, like every sensation or position, can only exist relative to another and in opposition to itself.
Contradiction is rendering knowledge whole.
To deny or contradict is not to destroy knowledge but to render it whole, and the investigation of the absurd by the artist bears a strange resemblance, in the active mode, to the passive and penetrating Credo quia absurdum of Saint Augustine.47
What characterizes nature is the impossibility of the contrary within the same phenomenon or the same object, and one single exception to a law is sufficient to sweep away millions of experiences.
Conversely, what characterizes the domain of Mind is not only the possibility but the necessity of the contrary. Discovery always identifies that wholeness; that is the utility, if not the goal, of Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension.
What does “the Fourth Dimension” mean?
What, in fact, do we mean by the “fourth dimension?” It is the necessary symbol of an unknown without which the known could not exist.
The fourth dimension, in our world of three dimensions, is that variable whose existence is indispensable in every equation of the human mind, but whose quality vanishes on contact with numbers as soon as one attempts to give it a specific value. How, for instance, can geometry be made more flexible, permitting it to consider aesthetic curves other than by the official prohibition of research into the squaring of the circle? How can the artificial game of mathematics be humanized by introducing between the numbers, like cement, the continuity of life?
Again, how can movement be explained, other than by means of motionless points within the three rigid dimensions of space? Immediately we discern
a providential unknown, a variable: time—and we attribute the role of fourth dimension to it, thus transforming it, on contact with space, into a known value satisfying the equation: a quantity which, alive though it is, becomes henceforth no more than a useful but mechanical mannequin, a symbol of that continuity without which all scientific conception is no more than a body without a soul.
How, in the domain of ideas, can the motionless movement of a work of art be related to the apparent movement of life? How can an immeasurable quality be related to measurable ones? How can the fusion of the past and the future in our subconscious, outside time, be related to the fluctuations of consciousness?
The certainty of the hypothetical fourth dimension will mark the place that can no longer remain empty—except that, the more our partial equations satisfy us, the more the symbol flies away, always more ungraspable, deserting the cultivated fields for virgin terrain.
Behind each wall that is breached we find a new wall, behind which the fourth dimension already and necessarily lies: the eternal and indecipherable secret permitting the squaring of the ever-increasing circle of our knowledge.
I do not know how this quest for the absolute can appear illusory and deceptive to those who see nothing in the pursuit but its eventual success and who think, quite rightly, that a little circle will do as well as a big one to achieve the squaring of our knowledge. Is not the path we follow as interesting as the end? Just as Life does not consist of achieving its end in time—which is to say, Death—but of its duration, infinite and eternal in depth, so the value of the pursuit of the unknown is the internal treasures that it reveals to us along the way.
Revelation has been within us since the origin of the World.
Let us not, indeed, be mistaken: since the origin of the world, all possibilities and all future ideas have been in existence, as seeds of potential. It is, therefore, not to the future that it is necessary to look for revelation but the power of our memory. The poet of the enlightened land who conceived in very ancient times the symbol of the Earthly Paradise: God saying, after Adam had touched the Tree of Science, “He has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”—which is to say, the for and the against, the androgynous idea—“now we must make sure that he does not touch the Tree of Life and live forever”, thus condemning man to material labor; was several thousand years ahead, not only of his own time, but of ours.
Humankind, as a whole, cannot follow the fulgurant course of an Idea; its progress is slower and “forward thinkers”—precursors—have to have the patience to wait until everyone else’s ideas have caught up with theirs: a patience often difficult for the thinker who, after being madly elevated, must return to his point of departure and, estranged by what he has seen, feels like a foreigner visiting his own world.
The usefulness of precursors.
Is it necessary to conclude that these forward thinkers, these bold recognitions, are useless? Quite the contrary, for it is in bringing superhuman heroes to life, imagining the reality of facts whose prototypes remain latent in the world of ideas, that poets and researchers construct the frame of the world. Their exceptional follies of today will become the banality of tomorrow, and the crowd will eventually hasten to take the presently-accessible steps which they are carving out in the clouds—and that crowd, in its blind course, will have been upraised without knowing it.
Without changing position, the opposition of yesterday becomes the reaction of tomorrow, the exception becomes the law in its turn; only the Idea is immutable through its successive incarnations, its changes of material form: the relativities, in a word, that we call Life. It is for us to extract the substance from the shadow and seize the eternal element of things.
The Fourth Dimension is the Unknown without which the Known would not exist.
The eternal element of things, the immutable movement of thought, the permanent critique of transitory forms, the perpetual whiplash that prevents the realm of consciousness from crystallizing out and falling asleep, the unknown that must always be added to the known in order to complete it, the fourth measure without which the three others would not be able to take account of the whole universe, is what we call, for want of a better term, the fourth dimension.
Have we, quite simply, discovered God?
But, you might say, this fourth dimension, this unknown inaccessible to any human equation, this universal inconstant, this absolute to which we must all be relative, this judge of all our thoughts, this eternal subconscious that mysteriously nourishes our consciousness, this creator that realizes itself in every creature, has been known to us ever since humankind mumbled its first words! This eternal element of things is God!
Yes, but a God to be created.
Well, no, quite the contrary—and that is why we need a new symbol which differs from the idea of God as the integral calculus in mathematics, which progresses from infinitesimals to finite quantities, differs from the differential calculus which descends from finite grandeurs to their infinitesimal components.
Just as, in fact, it seems evident to us that in biology the synthesis of a living being would have consequences more important than the analysis of life, in philosophy, so the error of past centuries was, we believe, to exteriorize a priori the idea of God and, conceiving the world in reverse, to deduce by begging the question that the human mind is a result, instead of envisaging it as a cause.
In every epoch, thinkers act like shepherd’s dogs, racing far ahead of the flock of ideas, perceiving, when they arrive at their destination, that one thing is missing: the flock that they were guiding; from there, they take these deceptive backward steps. As for the men of science, they count the flock where it is, install it and organize it, but do not bring it a single step forward. By going in quest of the fourth dimension, we intend to search man for the unknown that is nowhere but within him, to develop in man the divinity that is nowhere but within him, to create God by man and within him.
We shall come back to this point.
I remember a distant baccalaureate in philosophy that I rightly passed by hesitating to offer striking proofs of the existence of God. It is true that my dear teacher and friend Izoulet had disdainfully abstained from giving his course in Metaphysics, and that his young replacement, Professor Dumas, had substituted for Theodicy, with a smile, some enlightened views of experimental physiology.48 On reflection, however, I cannot imagine that the best lessons would have ameliorated my condition. Proofs of the existence of God? Certainly, we shall have them one day: the day when the sons of the Tree of Science will themselves have achieved divinity—in many thousands and thousands of centuries, of superhuman labors and sublime thoughts, after many consoling errors, regressions and facile mirages!
Proofs of the existence of God? It is up to man to furnish them himself, and that might take a little time yet.
Leviathan imperils modern society.
Our fears have been confirmed by the War.
If the first chapters of Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension were designed to suggest ways of thought detached from hereditary prejudices, those which follow, dedicated to the Leviathan, carry the fight to present errors. They indicate the dangerous menace of collective conceptions that put the individual in second place, conceptions that the War has only served to materialize in a hideous and disturbing fashion. We are not speaking as a dreamer but as a witness, because we have gone through it, and if the war horrified us, it is not because it revealed, as is falsely claimed, a regression towards animality, but, entirely to the contrary, the terrifying progress of belief in an animal superior to man in the scale of being, in the Animal-State, which we have called the Leviathan—the named that Hobbes, its first inventor, gave to it.
It is evident, in fact, the modern warfare no longer responds to a need for natural selection between individuals and that it no longer bears any resemblance to those great autumnal winds which, in nature, break the dead branches and sweep away the yellowed leaves for the greater benefit of the tre
e. It is no longer a matter of letting the strongest—let alone the most intelligent—survive, but, on the contrary, of killing them and allowing the survival of the physically and morally defective elements that compose the cells of that inferior and monstrous animal which is called the State.
For, because the modern State no longer responds to any but the lowest needs and instincts of organic life, the privileged cells that compose it necessarily represent the most frightful selection for degeneration imaginable.
The Animal-State: a seductive thesis.
The thesis of the Animal-State is, in addition, not lacking in seductive logic. Without having sufficiently measured the extent of its irresponsibility, I was weak enough to defend it in 1897 in a little book entitled A Definition of the State.
I admit too that, 15 years later, having been informed by my dear friend Professor R. Prout on his return from America about the admirable work of Dr. Carrel,49 I was forcibly struck by the strange regressions that degrade—morally, one might say—tissues of a superior order when, separated from the human body and living independently in tissue-cultures, they no longer have to fulfill superior muscular or nervous functions.
Reduced to base alimentary functions, nourished, washed, purged each day by a nurse, having no other responsibility than general orders, no moral duty of command or information—no longer having, in a word, anything to do but live—such a tissue, previously superior, soon takes on the appearance of inferior tissues; it loses its personality, grows and begins to reproduce in a bestial and distressing fashion. What a facile and tempting social symbol, permitting the conclusion that man, the social cell, obtains all his superior qualities from the State!
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