Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  12 The festival of mid-Lent had perforce to be celebrated frugally; the second reference to “une curée sanglante” refers to the practice by which hunters throw a few scraps of their quarry to the hounds that have actually brought it down, while retaining the good meat for themselves.

  13 Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was a controversial skeptical historian, widely reproached for his representation of Christianity as a mere mythology; the reference here is to his methodological approach, eventually summarized in such works as L’avenir de la science (1890).

  14 Homo homini lupus, quoted from Plautus’ Asinaria, was cited by Hobbes in Leviathan as a truism, although less cynical translators prefer to capture the intended rather than the literal meaning by rendering it as “to a stranger, man is a wolf.”

  15 Herbert Spencer gave a name to the science of sociology, and lent such considerable support to selected aspects of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection that many of the assertions nowadays grouped under the heading of “Darwinism” really ought to be called “Spencerism.”

  16 Claude Bernard was a pioneering physiologist whose Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale is considered a masterful definition of scientific method.

  17 This method of attempted communication had been employed by the hero of Gustave Le Rouge’s Le prisonnier de la planète Mars (1908; available in a Black Coat Press edition, with its sequel, as The Vampires of Mars); it had earlier been suggested by the American astronomer W. H. Pickering, but Pawlowski is far more likely to have run across it in Le Rouge’s novel

  18 “Lumière noise” [black light] was a term used by Gustave Le Bon in L’évolution de la matière—on which much of the substance of this chapter is based—to indicate electromagnetic radiations outside the visual spectrum. Le Bon construed such radiations, or “effluvia” [fluids], as phases in the fatal return of matter towards the condition of ether—i.e., the gradual and inevitable decay of matter into energy.

  19 In the La Boétie text the figure 2,830,000 kilograms is misrendered as 2,380,000; although the mistake might have been Pawlowski’s. I have corrected it to the figure given in Le Bon’s text. Le Bon gives the necessary expenditure as 68,000 francs, but Pawlowski’s figure is presumably corrected for inflation (which was of course, steep during the Great War).

  20 On a modern map this map reference leads to a point somewhere north of Alençon, but Pawlowski is, of course, using the Paris meridian rather than the Greenwich one; the relevant location is in the south-east suburbs of Paris, probably the spot on which the author was writing.

  21 Although chemically related to chloroform, iodoform is not normally used as an anesthetic but as a dressing for wounds.

  22 Soliped actually means “whole foot” rather than “single foot,” being used to contrast animals like the horse with those with “cloven feet,” such as goats.

  23 “Stibine” derives from the Latin term for antimony, Stibium, which gives the element its chemical symbol, Sb.

  24 Kermes is the common name of an insect related to the cochineal beetle, which was once similarly used to produce a red dye. Antimony sulphide, commonly known as antimony red, was also used as a pigment.

  25 The word “tourbe”, here literally translated as “peat,” is also used metaphorically to mean “mob” or “rabble,” thus setting up a play on words with the other item employed in this paragraph, where “casques de tourisme aérien” (literally suggestive of some kind of special headgear worn by tourists traveling by air) might also signify “6000 head of airborne tourists.” Pawlowski’s prophetic gift had evidently allowed him to glimpse the future of cheap air travel that is now our present, as well as the routine exposure or civilians to acts of war, although he was wrong about the omnipotence of the Absolute Savant.

  26 Mantes is about 35 kilometres west of central Paris, Château-Thierry about twice as far away to the east, so the capital has not yet extended nearly as far as Pawlowski here estimates in jest, although it is considerably bigger than it was in his day.

  27 Caribert (521-567) was a Merovingian king of the Franks, who married Ingoberge (519-589) in 540.

  28 Strictly speaking pucerons—the adaptation from the Latin exists in English as well as French—are aphids, or a “plant-lice,” but as the artificial bird is a synthetic animal, it seems preferable to use the term “lice.”

  29 Although the entities subsequently called bacteriophages had first been detected in 1896 by Ernest Hankin, the term was not coined until 1917 by the French-Canadian biologist Félix d’Hérelle.

  30 Percival Pott was an English doctor who have his name to a quasi-arthritic affliction of the lumbar vertebrae; its citation here continues the running analogy between the typical afflictions of the automatic machines and those of their human predecessors.

  31 Drosera rotundifolia is the insectivorous plant commonly known as sundew; it does not, if fact, have “tentacles.” Pawlowski might have confused it with the more spectacular Venus fly-trap.

  32 The French word larve carries a double meaning that is not readily translated into English, the latter language having only retained one of the Latin root-term’s original meanings in common parlance. As well as referring to the larva of an insect it refers to a kind of ghost or specter, often of a malevolent character. The new meaning imposed on the tern in this chapter echoes and transforms both originals.

  33 The French title of this chapter, Le jardin des planètes, echoes the name of Le Jardin des Plantes, the principal botanical and zoological gardens in Paris.

  34 This reference is to a famous passage in Plato’s Republic, in which the philosopher suggests, perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that artists might have to be banished from an ideal state whose citizens aspire to a precious calm of mind, because they devote themselves to nourishing the well of the emotions instead of furthering the empire of reason. Aristotle famously disagreed, although Plato was more of a poet than Aristotle ever was. The problem was, however, restated in Félix Bodin’s study of Le roman de l’avenir (1834; available in a Black Coat Press edition as The Novel of the Future), whose author was driven to wonder whether the ideal of social perfectibility was compatible with the ideals of Romance—and to conclude, a trifle reluctantly, that it was not.

  35 This image recalls the plot of the first winner of the Prix Goncourt, Force ennemie [Hostile Force] (1903) by John-Antoine Nau (Eugène Torquet), in which an inmate of a lunatic asylum is plagued by the disincarnate soul of an extraterrestrial, obtaining a graphic account of the invader’s nightmarish native world.

  36 This idea, too, echoes a recently-published scientific romance: André Couvreur’s Une invasion de macrobes [A Macrobe Invasion] (1909).

  37 The citation of these particular examples is likely to remind the reader that the persistence of familiar animals is one of the most evident inconsistencies in the narrator’s reconstituted future history; the horse and the dog had once been so completely forgotten that the last surviving specimens were known as the Soliped and the anti-elephant.

  38 Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was France’s most notorious revolutionary socialist. Imprisoned under Louis-Philippe, he was released during the 1848 revolution, but was so troublesome thereafter that he was imprisoned again even before Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état. When the Second Empire collapsed he was briefly released but was imprisoned again as swiftly as before, this time in the Fort du Taureau in Brittany; he was elected president of the Paris Commune but his jailers would not release him to take up the appointment. It was after that, in 1872, that he wrote the pamphlet cited by Pawlowski, whose title is deliberately echoed and transfigured in the title of this chapter, “L’immortalité par les idées.”

  39 This argument was reproduced, without acknowledgement, in an essay by the English Marxist scientist J. B. S. Haldane entitled “Some Consequences of Materialism,” collected in The Inequality of Man and Other Essays (1932). Another of Haldane’s essays, “The Last Judgment,” provided the blue
print for Olaf Stapledon’s future history Last and First Men (1930).

  40 Zeno of Elea formulated the famous paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, which Pawlowski takes as proof that time and space are not infinitely divisible; he was acquainted with it via Plato’s Parmenides, named for the leader of the pre-Socratic Eleatic school of philosophy. It is not, however, obvious that the objection is sufficient to demolish Blanqui’s thesis, or is even relevant to it.

  41 It is, in fact, not obvious that the mere possibility of infinite duplication is sufficient to prove anything of the sort—although, of course, the whole argument breaks down as soon as it is admitted that the universe is finite (as Gustave Le Bon had alleged as a corollary of the proposition that matter is in a state of permanent decay). Even in 1923, Pawlowski was writing before the discovery that the universe is expanding had been fully formulated or popularized, so he had no inkling of what would ultimately come to be called “Big Bang theory.” The Blanqui thesis has, however, since been transferred in its application to a hypothetically infinite multiverse of parallel alternative universes—in which context its falseness, if it is false, still remains somewhat less than obvious.

  42 Although Pawlowski is an atheist, considering God to be merely a fictitious invention made in man’s own image, he is a conspicuously Christian atheist; his philosophical God-substitute is universal Love, and—as we shall shortly see—even incorporates a crucial Last Judgment.

  43 The narrative becomes a trifle anthropocentric at this point, after which it seems that the human race constitutes the intelligence of the universal consciousness, as it were, single-mindedly. What has become of the Martians who so blithely dissociated the lamb cutlet, and the inhabitants of other worlds like the one glimpsed in the Garden of the Planets? If they are included in the orgy of universal love and limitless telepathic communication, the narrator surely ought to have some interesting things to tell us about them.

  44 This state of “perpetual becoming” is, according to Henri Bergson, the essence of our actual experience of time, as opposed to our measurement of its apparent dimensionality by means of clocks, calendars and historical and geological calculation.

  45 Although the word unicity (unicité in French) has been dropped from many modern dictionaries it was once in common usage among philosophers who wanted, as Pawlowski does, to add a further emphasis to the notion of unity, simultaneously embracing the notion of uniqueness.

  46 The famous 12th century Persian poet Sheikh Muslih-ud-Din Mushrif ibn Abdullah, who used the pseudonym Saadi, or Sadi, was the author of the Bustan [The Orchard] and the Gulistan [The Rose-Garden]; the proffered quotation is derived from the latter volume, first introduced to the West in the 17th century.

  47 The phrase credo quia absurdum, usually translated as “I believe it because it is absurd,” was often used by Christian theologians as a defiant defense of religious faith against the otherwise-unanswerable assaults of rational argument. It probably originated as a misquotation from Tertullian, who argued that some stories are so inherently implausible that no one would bother to make them up, and that their implausibility might therefore count as evidence of their truth. Pawlowsky’s citation of Saint Augustine is a common misattribution.

  48 Jean Izoulet (1854-1929) was best known for his 1894 book on La cité moderne et la metaphysique de sociologie; he was a friend of Jules Bois, one of whose books he introduced. The “young” Professor Dumas who replaced Izoulet as Pawlowsky’s university teacher is difficult to identify; it cannot have been the famous chemist and pioneer of analytical physiology Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas (1800-1884) but might well have been a descendant of his.

  49 I cannot prove any clearer identification of R. Prout but the more significant reference here is to Alexis Carrel, who became one of the first celebrity scientists by going to work in the USA and mastering the art of self-publicity; he won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for his work on growing animal tissues in vitro, which offered the (unfortunately false) promise of producing skin grafts for burn victims, growing organs for transplantation and producing meat without the requirement of livestock. His masterstroke as a self-publicist was to write his popular book on The Culture of Organs in collaboration with the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. The various references in the Voyage to grafting, which now sound rather odd, are extrapolations of what Carrel was trying to achieve.

  50 Harmodios and Aristogiton were two youths who killed the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus during the festival of Panathenea in 514 B.C., after he had insulted their sister. The former was slain on the spot but the latter was captured and tortured; he then implicated various friends of Hipparchus’ brother Hippias, who were promptly executed, but stopped naming supposed conspirators when—according to his own declaration—there was no one else he wanted to see dead except for Hippias himself.

  51 Jean Petit (1360-1411) defended the assassination of the Duc d’Orléans by agents of the Duke of Burgundy, Jean Sans Peur [Fearless John], and was widely condemned for doing so. The Sainte-Ligue of the 16th century was a confederation of Catholics founded by the ambitious Duc de Guise, ostensibly to protect the Church from the protestant dynasty of Henri III (the ligueurs were eventually thwarted by Henri IV’s conversion, although they had already lost popularity by making an alliance with Philip II of Spain).

  52 The element of humor in the teachings of Socrates, as popularized by his pupil Plato, is often ignored, although, as Pawlowski observes in due course, the witty aspect of Zeno’s paradoxes is still appreciated; the tale of Achilles and the tortoise is still told as a joke and is cited in many others.

  53 Only an observer in a three-dimensional word can see a square sign become diamond-shaped as it rotates and then present a straight line when seen side-on; when Pawlowski asks us to imagine that we “belong” to a two-dimensional world, he is asking us to imagine that sight only allows us to perceive two dimensions.

  54 James Bradley observed the aberration named after him in 1725. The famous experiment carried out by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887 was an attempt to calculate the velocity of the Earth relative to the “luminiferous ether” by comparing the speed of light arriving from a distant object when the Earth was moving away from the source at one extreme of its orbit and towards it at the other. The measured difference was less than the velocity of the Earth in its orbit, and was subsequently assumed to arise from instrumental error. In 1899-1904 Hendrik Lorentz and Joseph Larmor attempted to explain the result by means of the distortion that came to be known as the “Lorentz contraction,” which became the basis of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, published in 1905.

  55 Walter Kauffmann and Max Abraham produced early theories of the electron; although Gustave Le Bon’s L’évolution de matière was published in 1905, before Le Bon was able to acquaint himself with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it does include this observation regarding the variation of the mass of the electron with velocity, which tends to infinity as that velocity approaches the speed of light. Le Bon deduces from this that the electron and other “effluvia” are entities intermediate between mass and energy, demonstrating a transition between the “ponderable” and the “imponderable”—a rhetorical formulation echoed by Pawlowski, whose fourth dimension is a means of transition between the material and the ideal.

  56 Hermann Minkowski was the mathematician who pioneered the application of geometrical methods to number theory and developed a model of a four-dimensional universe—known as “Minkowski spacetime”—which he integrated into Einstein’s theory of special relativity in 1908.

  57 Actually, no. The diminution of the object approaching the speed of light relative to the observer takes place along the observer’s line of sight, so the visible profile of the object would not change. The notion that the Lorentz contraction is analogous to a “temporal rotation” whereby the “lost extent” has vanished into a fourth dimension is admirably bizarre, but false. Pawlowski seems to have been trapped in a false analogy
by the careless remark he made earlier about the observer of a sign “belonging” to a two-dimensional world—by which he could only properly mean being unable to distinguish the third dimension by means of sight, not actually inhabiting a two-dimensional world.

  58 Stéphane Leduc’s Théorie physico-chimique de la vie et générations spontanées (1910; tr. as The Mechanism of Life) offered an account of the origin of life based on the observation that certain chemical intrusions into solutions form semi-permeable membranes with extraordinary shapes. The Académie des Sciences had earlier refused to publish his work because the theory of spontaneous generation, which had been sternly opposed by Louis Pasteur half a century before, was considered inherently “unscientific,” but Gustave Le Bon included an account of it in L’évolution de la matière and integrated it into his own account of that evolution, as Pawlowski does here. The phenomena Leduc observed and documented have been reincorporated into some modern hypotheses relating to the origin of life.

  59 Protamoeba primitiva was a hypothetical “elementary protozoan” proposed by 19th-century evolutionists in the mid-19th century, when microscopes were not yet powerful enough to display bacteria and confirm the true complexity of primitive life-forms. The term was obsolete by the time Pawlowski was writing, but still recognizable.