Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  It is then that the man pauses for reflection, and looks back at those he must help. He becomes conscious of his worth and his responsibilities; he finally understands that nothing can come henceforth from anyone but him.

  In the history of the world, the human mind will not be free of its infancy until the day when it will experience that crisis of distress, hesitation and mourning. On that day, a thinker or a poet will have the courage to pronounce these oppressive words: “Heaven is empty, my father is dead, or rather, never existed; it was my shadow, immeasurably magnified, that I followed along the road.”

  Above all, though, he will have the superhuman strength to add: “It is up to us, henceforth, to take the place of our dead father and to realize that necessary God to whom we have attributed all science, all wisdom and all providence.”

  I do not know whether many men would be capable today of making the prodigiously painful effort that would claim such an enfranchisement, and centuries might yet be necessary to discern the sense of it. On that day, we shall doubtless understand that no unknown exists outside ourselves and that it is within ourselves that all of the immense unknown must be sought.

  But we are still nothing but little children.

  Everything informs us, in fact, that the entire experience of centuries past is in the depths of our own consciousness, and that all the possibilities of the future are also there. If we were not still in prehistory, amid the first mumblings of humankind, if our minds were to become conscious of the formidable forces at their disposal, it is quite evident that we would only have to interrogate ourselves with enough force to know everything, although we still know almost nothing today.

  Unfortunately, progress only happens very slowly, by virtue of the slothfulness, anguish and instinctive terror that our minds experience when we attempt to peer into that bottomless gulf. Everything in life still remains profoundly mysterious to us: the implacability of physical laws, the mobility of moral laws, a ray of light, a sound, an odor, a fugitive thought, and so many other subjects that suffice to plunge us, hardly aware of it as we are, into such an abyss of reflections that we sense clearly, from time to time, that there would be a sort of moral danger in peering too long into that abyss.

  To take the place of the divinity—which is to say, to attain by oneself the explanation of every mystery—that is the formidable mission of man, a mission that even the best minds only fulfill, in the course of an entire life, for a few fugitive seconds of genius. Surrounding these few genuine useful lightning-flashes are missed steps, clarifications, eternal recommencements, provisional certainties, relative absolutes, abortive actions or ideas, wasted passions, movements or endeavors! How many seeds whirl away in the wind for every one that germinates!

  D. Berthelot64 once offered, as an example to electricians, the luminous efficiency of the glow-worm, which is a 100%, while that of the Sun is only 14% and that of our lamps 21%; we wonder whether a similar example of efficiency might be proposed with regard to the human mind, while remembering that the worm only glows when it is in love.

  A day will come when man will know himself.

  When we finally understand that revelations can only come from ourselves and not from our anthropomorphic creations, when it becomes evident that everything in the world is relative, but relative to us, and that it is in ourselves alone that we can find the communal measure of the universe, perhaps then we shall finally understand ourselves and obtain consciousness of our worth.

  One day, perhaps in millennia, the first man will come who, having the true power of thought, will possess the absolute science of the universe and the sources of life. It is necessary to content ourselves, in our primitive era, to play in that regard the very humble, and yet very enviable, role of John the Baptist.

  This will be the Man-God.

  That man and those of his race, according to the ancient prophecy, will be gods and will live forever.

  That man will live, at the very least, for the time that he judges necessary to his full wisdom; he will be the God that we have designed, but who cannot exist outside of us, as we imagine, for he would otherwise have been able to create a new being superior to man long before.

  Will he be the God of men, the God of the Earth, the God of the celestial immensities? It hardly matters, since he will know everything that concerns our universe. He will know the intimate constitution of matter, he will be able to create life, he will reproduce the mysteries of mimesis and all the other prodigies of natural history, he will know what electricity is, he will be able to transmute simple bodies solely by means of molecular displacement, he will utilize for his needs the prodigious forces of dematerialization, he will decipher thoughts at a distance, resuscitate the dead, heal the sick, journey into the past and future by interrogating his consciousness….

  He will be, in sum, an exceedingly distinguished engineer.

  He will be everything, relative to science… in reality, he will be nothing.

  The God-scientist will know doubt, and will search for God.

  For on that day, in the depths of his consciousness, the distressing mystery of the contrary with pose itself again.

  Knowing the universe to the extent of its extreme limits, its intimate life and its construction, the new God will, however, understand that he only knows it from within, which is to say, from himself, and that he has none of the vision from without that a superior God, for example, might possess. And, beginning to doubt himself, the savant God will soon kneel down like his human ancestors before the great mystery.

  Pensive, anxiously turning his gaze toward the Heavens, the new God would search for God. He will have done everything to understand the world, and he will have reconstructed it scientifically, piece by piece, in his own image, his will imposing itself on the universe—and, at the moment of attaining the absolute, of integrating all science, the magnificent edifice will fall into dust before the light breath of the contrary, which the poets of yesteryear would doubtless have named the Evil Genius, but which men of common sense simply call humor.

  For the imagination always creates a contrary.

  To construct a world whose relativities are all known, all measured: what a sublime, definitive, complete work….until the day when the necessity of the contrary awakes in the depths of consciousness: the possible existence, then conceived, of a world in which relativity would make no sense. For, as we said at the beginning of this critical analysis, everything imaginable exists, solely by virtue of the fact that it is imagined.

  Already, certain conclusions can be derived from the preceding pages; let us attempt to offer a synthesis, in which we shall also try to find the symbol in the final pages of this book, devoted to the Golden Eagle.

  The intelligence of the Universe is trying to know itself.

  For reasons that are still unknown to us, that which we call, for want of a better term, universal intelligence, seems to be animated by a prodigious desire to know itself—which is to say, to realize itself.

  In order to do that it needs a mirror, and that mirror is the World. A self-consciousness by itself remains, in effect, obscure, continuous, immobile, eternal and indiscernible. It can only act and realize itself by contradiction, opposition, reaction and limitation in a time and a space.

  By creating symbols.

  By what prodigious effort of creation has the consciousness of the world objectivized these partial movements and local energies that we call matter? How has it differentiated this matter, opposing it in groupings, and then in different beings?

  That we still do not know, but we can find out by ourselves, since we are the superior and prodigious expression of that consciousness-in-progress, which permits us to glimpse its permanent qualities in transitory phenomena, and even outside them, since a fortunate relationship between two tones is not within the two tones.

  For everything is connected in a world of the same origin and the same nature, and if, for example, the political views of a La Boétie writing the
Treatise on Voluntary Servitude were correct, they would enable us to clarify, by analogy, the interest-groups in nature subordinating certain cells to the authority of one privileged cell.

  Thus, on the one hand, there is a universal consciousness which seeks means of expression and which constitutes reality; and, on the other, there are means of expression that are only symbols of the reality, variations on the same theme, ingenious expedients permitting the arbitrary fractionation of the continuous.

  Relative to the consciousness of the world, beings and things are only symbols, just as the words of languages and mathematical formulas are with respect to our consciousness.

  Man is the most complete symbol of reality.

  Man is the most elevated symbol of nature: its beloved son; its masterpiece, slowly built on heaps of cadavers in the course of countless centuries.

  The unknown does not exist; there are only the possibilities of the known, which always increase, and it is in man that the highest possibilities exist.

  It is not, strictly speaking, by his artistic knowledge of qualities that man is distinct from other beings; salt has its savor, a crystal the form that it maintains, an animal the beauty of which it is proud. Nor is it, precisely, by his awareness of contradiction; the strategy of a hunted animal requires psychological treasures in the world of sensations.

  He is conscious of himself, like other beings but he is also conscious of the universe.

  No, what renders man superior to everything else is the care that he takes, not only to persevere in his own qualities, which is the action of every created symbol, but also to acquire a subjective knowledge of what surrounds him, to incorporate himself in the very consciousness of the universe—an anxiety that is generally translated, in a touching fashion, into a desire for immortality.

  We have previously examined the obstacles that man encounters on that superhuman road, which incite him slothfully to crystallize out false symbolic certainties of his own qualities, in taking his anthropomorphic creations for external reality.

  We have also said that doubt and humor alone can permit him to resume his forward progress by showing him that the possibility of the contrary lurks behind each certainty.

  This subjective consciousness of the Universe is impossible without the fourth dimension.

  One last problem remains to be resolved: how can we, by means of our consciousness, attain this subjective consciousness of the world, and by means of an effort of thought—however prodigious it might be—enlightened in the course of future centuries by thousands of new symbols, arrive at a knowledge of the universe, as if we were the universe? Our consciousness, you might say, is individual, personal to each of us; it might permit us to know ourselves, but it is not the consciousness of the universe permitting us to know that universe subjectively.

  This reasoning is perfect, if one considers consciousness as one does the heart or the liver in the world of our three-dimensional symbols.

  Unicity, the conclusion of this book.

  It is deprived of sense if one brings in, entirely to the contrary, the superior notion of the fourth dimension. Space and time, conveniently but arbitrarily fragmenting the real continuum, collapse like a provisional scaffolding when we retrieve consciousness of the real world, in which all is quality and in which quantity no longer exists—and it is thus that the fourth dimension leads us, for the first time, to a sound notion of the Unicity of the atom, the conclusion of this book and the point of departure of a new vision of the World.

  “Our” consciousness? But a mere moment of reflection is sufficient to make us understand that is only ours to the extent to which allow ourselves to contradict, judge, approve or qualify the ideas or the judgments of our three-dimensional senses—for, from the viewpoint of the fourth dimension, there can no longer exist any but a single continuous Consciousness, of which each one of us is merely a new attempt at the realization of sublime hopes.

  Only one consciousness exists in the Universe, which belongs specifically to every one of us.

  Now, every one of us could be everything, if he wished, instead of being, as usual, a simple deception, great or small. All that is required for that is a lightning-flash of faith or genius.

  Is that lightning-flash possible in a primitive era in which we are beginning to glimpse the scientific knowledge of the symbolic world of our three-dimensional sensations? We do not think so.

  For centuries yet, humankind will worship its symbols as idols and mistake its anthropomorphic hypotheses for external reality. Only when the day comes that man knows the how of everything will he probably go in search of the why, and the aurora of God’s goodness will succeed the dusk of the savant gods. While we wait, it is, we repeat, the prerogative of poets to prophesy future realities and the propriety of humorists to denounce the relativity of present pseudo-certainties.

  But there are subjects that one can only examine in our day before a restricted public; for, as Zeno said to Socrates in the Parmenides, the crowd does not know that it is impossible to attain the truth without these quests and voyages through everything—and perhaps it is premature to inform schoolchildren of the dubiousness of divinity.

  The reign of goodness is only possible in the four-dimensional continuum; it will make us understand the universality of love.

  Doubt is indeed a virtue of maturity for civilizations as for men; it engenders indulgence and disinclination to action; it should be a motive for discouragement for the ignorant, but the crown of all science for those who have learned everything.

  Now, the reign of goodness will not be possible on Earth until the day when the language of the soul has replaced the provisional deception of formulas and words. And on that day alone will the profound and universal meaning be revealed of love: a symbol still infinitely relative and restricted today, but which will become the formidable continuous reality of the future world of four dimensions, as pain is that of the engendered world of three dimensions.

  Notes

  1 Pawlowsky has “largeur, hauteur et profondeur” [breath, height and depth], using “profondeur” as a painter might, to refer to a horizontal rather than a vertical dimension; I have made the substitution in the interests of conserving clarity.

  2 Plato argued that the true objects of knowledge are not located in the world of sensory experience but in a world of Ideas or Forms that must lie beyond it, of which sensory phenomena are only a sort of distillate or shadow. He suggested that the disembodied soul might have direct knowledge of the Ideas and that the process by which the incarnate soul increases its knowledge is one of anamnesis [recollection], in which information is gradually and effortfully recovered from some kind of subconscious reservoir. Pawlowski’s narrator, in learning to perceive the fourth dimension, is, in effect, amplifying the process of anamnesis in order to gain access to this subconscious reservoir, and hence the world of Ideas. This kind of Idealism is contradicted by Materialism, which asserts that nothing exists but matter in motion and that knowledge can only consist of discovering associations between observed phenomena—the fundamental assumption on which the scientific method is based.

  3 The mathematician and philosopher Pierre Laplace suggested that a “daemon” which had full cognizance of the present position and directional velocity of every particle in the universe would be able to extrapolate the entire past and future from those data.

  4 The references here are to three of the mathematicians who made key contributions to the development of non-Euclidean geometry in the 19th century, Nikolai Lobatchevsky, Bernhard Riemann and Eugenio Beltrami, plus one of the first physicists to recruit their work to the explanation of actual phenomena, Hermann von Helmholtz. A fourth mathematician involved in that development, Félix Klein, is cited further down the page. Euclid had previously analyzed the foundations of geometry as a series of five postulates, the fifth of which was the “principle of parallelism,” which states that a point displaced from a line can have only one line drawn through it parallel to
the first; the first non-Euclidean geometries were derived by varying this postulate so that there is (in Lobatchevsky’s version) more than one possible parallel line or (in Riemann’s version) none at all.

  5 Said Pasha signed the concession authorizing Ferdinand de Lesseps to build the Suez Canal on November 30, 1854.

  6 Pawlowsky here invents the term vitessiers, whose translation I have likewise improvised. He is referring to the organizational principles pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor, converted into practice by “time-and-motion” studies. The publication of Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) caused a considerable stir the year before the Voyage appeared.

  7 A diligence, in this sense, is the type of coach that was employed in France as the principal form of public transportation of both people and mail before the advent of the railways.

  8 Modern readers encountering this image will inevitably be reminded of the work of M. C. Escher (1898-1972), who depicted several “horizontal staircases,” most famously in his Relativity, but Escher was still a teenager when this chapter was written, and Relativity dates from 1953.

  9 The actual Paris station from which most Midi-bound trains leave is the Gare de Lyon, which is located a long way south of the closely-associated Gare de Nord and Gare de l’Est; there are two other stations south of the Seine from which southbound long-distance trains depart, but neither of them is called the Gare du Midi (they are the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Gare Montparnasse).

  10 It is arguable that surhomme, the equivalent of the German übermensch, is better translated as “overman,” but I have employed the English usage that became most common.

  11 Estienne de La Boétie (1530-1563) was a close friend of the skeptical essayist Michel de Montaigne, who wrote a poignant memoir idealizing their relationship and published much of his friend’s work posthumously, in 1571—but not the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude cited here, which he considered too controversial; it was eventually published in 1576. It is a passionate diatribe against tyranny, asserting the sovereignty of the people and denying the divine right of kings—hence the alternative title Contr’un [Against One], signifying opposition to dictatorship. The Belgian press that published the third edition of Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension was named after La Boétie as a statement of its political ideals, in an era when tyrannical fascism was considered a more dangerous avatar of the Corporate State than communism.