remarkable way according as they are being paid in or paid out. We
all know to our cost the extraordinary superiority of the epochs when
our more elderly relatives were youthful. The fact remains that we
are always prone to regard the registering machine as a constant,
and to believe that all the variation comes from outside. It is easy
to discount the inner variation in ourselves when we are seasick, or
in others when they are old and reminiscent, but not only is this
discounting sometimes far more difficult, it is sometimes not even
attempted.
What, for instance, are we to say to those who profess to find a
harmony in the universe, those to whom poverty and discomfort and
hard work appear the merest accidents, to whom even disease, pain,
loss, death, and disaster are “somehow good”? You and I would probably
retort that we have a rooted dislike to discomfort, that we should most
strongly deny that the loss of a friend or even of a leg was anything
but bad, that a toothache was not damnably unpleasant. But I think that
if they were philosophically inclined (which they probably would not
be), they might justifiably retort that the difference between their
universe and ours was due to a difference in their mental machinery,
which they had succeeded in adjusting so that it registered in a
different and a better way.
It is at least clear that something of the sort can happen in the
intellectual sphere. To the uneducated, the totality of things, if ever
reflected upon, is a compound of fog and chaos: advance is painfully
slow, and interlarded with unpleasant falls into pits and holes of
illogicality and inconsequence; to those who have taken the trouble to
push on, however, an orderly system at last reveals itself.
The problem of the origin and relationship of species gave such mental
distress to those zoologists of the first half of the nineteenth
century who were conscientious enough to struggle with it, that
many of them ended by a mental suppression of the problem and a
refusal to discuss it further. The publication of Darwin’s _Origin
of Species_ was to them what psycho-analysis is (or may be) to a
patient with a repressed complex. Or again, no one can read accounts
of the physicists’ recent work on the structure of the atom without
experiencing an extraordinary feeling of satisfaction. Instead of
wallowing in unrelated facts, we fly on wings of principle; not only
can we better cut our way through the jungle of things, but we are
allowed a privilege that has universally been considered one of the
attributes of Gods--the calm and untroubled understanding of things and
processes.
“The Gods are happy.
They turn on all sides
Their shining eyes,
And see below them
The earth and men.”
This being so, what is to prevent us from believing that, once certain
adjustments are made in the mental sausage-machine, we shall discover
that what we once found impossibly tough meat will pass smoothly
through and become done up into the most satisfactory of sausages?
In other words, that the values are there if we choose to make
them--an Euckenish doctrine which, for all that it arouses instinctive
suspicion, may none the less be true.
But even when we have made all possible discounts of this kind, evolved
the smoothest-running machinery, converted the raw and meaty material
of being into every conceivable kind of tidy sausage, the fact remains
that there are feats beyond the power of our machine--beyond its power
because of the very quality of its being.
We live at a certain rhythm in time, at a certain level of size and
space; beyond certain limits, events in the outer world are not
directly appreciable by the ordinary channels of sense, although a
symbolic picture of them may be presented to us by the intellect.
When we are listening to the organ, sometimes there come notes which
are on the border-line between sound and feeling: their separate
vibrations are distinguishable and pulse through us, and the more the
vibrations are separable, the more they are felt as mechanical shocks,
the less as sound. However, we know perfectly well that all sounds as
a matter of fact depend on vibratory disturbance, and that it is only
some peculiarity of the registering machinery, in ear or brain, which
enables us to hear a note as continuous.
Still more remarkable are the facts of vision. As I write I see
the tulips in my garden, red against the green grass: the red is a
continuous sensation; but the physicists appear to be justified in
telling us that the eye is being bombarded every second with a series
of waves, not the few hundred or thousand that give us sound, but the
half-billion or so which conspire to illuminate our vision.
With sound, we alter the frequency of the waves and we get a difference
of tone which seems to be merely a difference of more or less: but
alter the frequency of light-waves, and the whole quality of the
sensation changes, as when I look from the tulips to the sky. The
change of registering mechanism is here more profound than the change
in outer event.
Or again, to choose an example that depends more on size than rhythm,
how very difficult it is to remember that the pressure of air on our
bodies is not the uniform gentle embrace of some homogeneous substance,
but the bombardment of an infinity of particles. The particles are not
even all alike: some are of oxygen, others of nitrogen, of carbonic
acid gas, of water vapour. They are not all travelling at uniform
speeds; collisions are all the time occurring, and the molecules are
continuously changing their rate of travel as they clash and bump.
We have only to look down a microscope to convince ourselves of the
alteration in our experience that it would mean if we were to become
sufficiently diminished. The tiniest solid particles in fluids can
be seen to be in a continuous state of agitation--inexplicable until
it was pointed out that this mysterious “Brownian” movement was the
inevitable result of impacts by the faster-moving molecules of the
fluid. Many living things that we can still see are small enough to
live permanently in such agitation; the longest diameter of many
bacteria is but half a micron (a two-thousandth of a millimetre), and
there are many ultra-microscopic organisms which, owing to their closer
approximation to molecular dimensions, must pass their lives in erratic
excursions many times more violent than any visible Brownian motion.
If we could shrink, like Alice, at the persuasion of some magic
mushroom, the rain of particles on our skin, now as unfelt as midges
by a rhinoceros, would at last begin to be perceptible. We should
find ourselves surrounded by an infinity of motes; titillated by
a dance of sand-grains; bruised by a rain of marbles; pounded by
flights of fives-balls. What is more, the smaller we became, the
more individuality and apparent free-will should we detect in the
surrounding particles. As we got still smaller, we should, now and
again, find the nearly uniform bombardment replaced by a concerted
attack on one side or the other, and we should be hurled for perhaps
double our own length in one direction. If we could conceivably enter
into a single inorganic molecule, we should find ourselves one of a
moving host of similar objects: and we should further perceive that
these objects were themselves complex, some like double stars, others
star-clusters, others single suns, and all again built of lesser units
held in a definite plan, in an architecture reminding us (if we still
had memory) of a solar system _in petto_. If we were lucky enough
to be in a complicated fluid like seawater, we should be intrigued
by the relations of the different kinds of particles. They would be
continually coming up to other particles of different kinds, and would
then sometimes enter into intimate union with them. If we could manage
to follow their history, we should find that after a time they would
separate, and seek new partners, of the same or of different species.
Some kinds of the units, or people as we should be inclined to call
them, would spend most of their existence in the married state, others
would apparently prefer to remain single, or, if they married, would
within no long time obtain divorce.
We should be forcibly reminded of life in some cosmopolitan city like
London or New York. If there existed a registrar to note down the
events of these little beings’ existence, and we were privileged to
inspect the register, we should find that each had its own history,
different from that of every other in its course and its matrimonial
adventures.
If we were near the surface we should find that the outer beings always
arranged themselves in a special and coherent layer, apparently to
protect themselves against the machinations of the different beings
inhabiting the region beyond; for every now and again one would seem
to be pulled from the water and be lost among the more scattered
inhabitants of the air.
If we could now revert to our old size, we might remember, as we
listened to the scientist enunciating the simple formulæ of the
gas-laws, or giving numerical expression to vapour-pressures and
solubilities, that this simplicity and order which he enabled us to
find in inorganic nature was only simplicity when viewed on a large
enough scale, and that it was needful to deal in millions and billions
before chance aberrations faded into insignificance, needful to
experience molecules from the standpoint of a unit almost infinitely
bigger before individual behaviour could be neglected and merged in the
orderly average. And we might be tempted to wonder how the personal
idiosyncrasies of our human units might appear to a being as much
larger than we as we are larger than a molecule--whether kings and
beggars would not fare alike, and all the separate, striving, feeling,
conflicting personalities, with their individual histories, their
ancestors, successes, marriages, friendships, pains, and pleasures, be
merged in some homogeneous and simple effect, altering in response to
circumstances, with changes capable of expression in some formula as
simple as Boyle’s or Avogadro’s Law.
Almost more startling might be the effect of altering the rhythm at
which we live, or rather at which we experience events.
If only I were Mr. H. G. Wells, I could make a mint of money by a story
based on this idea of rhythm of living.[42] Let us see.... First there
would be Mercaptan the distinguished inventor, who would lead me (lay,
uninstructed, Watsonish me, after the fashion of narrators) into his
laboratory. There on the table would be the machine--all but complete:
handles, coils of wire, quartz terminals, gauges of rock-crystal in
which oscillated coloured fluids, platinum cogwheels ... dot ... dot
... dot ... dot.... He hardly dared to make the final connections, all
clear and calculable though they were. He had put so much of himself
into it: so many hopes ... fears ... dots....
Then there would be the farewell dinner-party--first the inventor’s
voice on the wireless telephone, summoning Wagrom the explorer, Glosh
of the _Evening Post_, Stewartson Ampill the novelist, and the rest
of our old friends: then the warm friendly light of the candles, the
excellent port, the absence of women, the reminiscences, the asterisks,
the....
Mercaptan refuses to allow the rest to come into the laboratory, in
case something should go wrong. He straps the machine on his shoulders,
makes a final connection; his life processes begin to work faster,
faster, ever faster. The first effect of course was a change of colour.
The blue oblong of the window became green--yellow--orange--red.
Meanwhile each wave-length of the ultra-violet became blue, and itself
ran down the gamut of colour. Then came the turn of the X-rays--by
their dim light he groped about, till they too became relatively too
slow for his retina. That ought to make him blind, of course--but no!
Mr. Wells had thought that all out; and he came into a state of nearly
maximum speed where he perceived a brilliant, phosphorescent light
given out by all objects, generated by disturbances of a wave-length
unimaginably, undiscoverably small. Meanwhile he had passed through an
amazing experience--he had heard the veritable music of the spheres!
That had happened when in his acceleration he had, so to speak, caught
up with the light-waves, until they were tuned to his ear’s organ of
Corti: and all that had been visible in his ordinary life was now to be
appreciated by hearing. Unfortunately, as his ears possessed no lens,
this universal music was to him of course merely a hideous babel of
sound.
At last, as the workings of his body approached the rapidity of light’s
own oscillations, he entered on a new phase--surrounded on every side
by an ocean of waves which lapped softly against his body--waves,
waves, and still more waves....
He was in that region not unlike that from which life has escaped when
it ceased to be infinitely little, a region in which none of the events
that make up our ordinary life, none of the bodies that are our normal
environment, have existence any more--all reduced to a chaos of billows
ceaselessly and meaninglessly buffeting his being.
“Mi ritrovai in una selva oscura.”
Life is a wood, dark and trackless enough to be sure; but Mercaptan
could not even see that it was a wood--for the trees.
Yet it was soothing: the very meaninglessness of the wave-rocking
released one of responsibility, and it was delicious to float upon this
strange etheric sea.
Then his scientific mind reasserted itself. He realized that he had
magnified his rate of life and was consuming his precious days at an
appalling speed. The lever was thrown into reverse, and he passed
gradually back to what he had been accustomed to think of as reality.
Back to it; and then beyond it, slowing his vital rhythm. This time
he was able by an ingenious arrangement to eliminate much of the
disturbing effect of his rhythm-change on his vision. It was an idea
of which he was very proud: every alternate light-wave was cut out when
he doubled the capacity of each process of life, and so on in automatic
correspondence. As a result he was enabled to get a picture of the
outer world very similar to that obtained in the ordinary accelerations
of slow processes that are made possible by running slow-taken cinema
records at high speed. He saw the snowdrops lift their matutinal heads
and drop them again at evening--an instant later; the spring was an
alarming burst of living energy, the trees’ budding and growth of
leaves became a portent, like the bristling of hairs on the backs of
vegetable cats. As his rate changed and he comprehended more and more
in each pulse, the flowers faded and fell before he could think of
plucking them, autumnal apples rotted in his grasp, day was a flash
and night a wink of the eye, the two blending at last in a continuous
half-light.
After a time ordinary objects ceased to be distinguishable; then the
seasons shared the fate of day and night. The lever was now nearly hard
over, and the machine was reaching its limits. He was covering nearly a
thousand of men’s years with each of his own seconds.
The cinema effect was almost useless to him now; and he discarded this
apparatus. Now followed what he had so eagerly awaited, something
deducible in general but unpredictable in all particulars. As the
repeated separate impacts of the ether waves had condensed, at his old
ordinary rate, to form the continuous sensation of light, so now the
events of nature coalesced to give new objects, new kinds of sensation.
Especially was this so with life: the repeated generations seemed to
act like separate repeated waves of light, blending to give a picture
of the species changing and evolving before his eyes.
Other experiences he could explain less well. He was conscious of
strange sensations that he thought were probably associated with
changes in energy-distribution, in entropy; others which he seemed to
perceive directly, by some form of telepathy, concerning the type of
mental process occurring around him. It was all strange: but of one
thing he was sure--that if only he could find a way of nourishing and
maintaining himself in this new state, he would be able, as a child
does in the first few years of life, to correlate his puzzling new
sensations, and that when he had done this he would obtain a different
and more direct view of reality than any he had ever obtained or
thought of obtaining before.
As the individual light-waves were summed to give light, as the
microcosm of gas-molecules cancelled out to give a uniformity of
pressure, so now the repetition of the years coalesced into what could
be described as visible time, a sensation of cosmic rate; the repeated
pullulations of living things fused into something perceived as organic
achievement: and the infinite variety of organisms, their conflicts
and interactions, resolved itself, through the mediation of his
sense-organs and brain at their new rhythm, into a direct perception of
life as a whole, an entity with a pressure on its environment, a single
slowly-evolving form, a motion and direction.
He put the lever to its limit: the rhythm of the cosmos altered again
in relation to his own. He had an extraordinary sense of being on the
verge of a revelation. The universe--that was the same; but what he
experienced of it was totally different. He had immediate experience
of the waxing and waning of suns, of the condensation of nebulæ, the
slowing down and speeding up of evolutionary processes.
The curious, apparently telepathic sense which he had had of the
mental side of existence was intensified. Through it, the world began
to be perceived as a single Being, with all its parts in interaction.
The shadowy lineaments of this being were half seen by his mental
vision--vast, colossal, slowly changing; but they appeared only to
disappear again, like a picture in the fire.
Strive as he might, he could not see its real likeness. Now it appeared
benign; at its next dim reappearance there would be a feeling of
capricious irresponsibility about it: at another instant it was cold,
remote; once or twice terrible, impending over and filling everything
with a black demoniacal power which brought only horror with it.
If he could but accelerate the machine! He wanted to _know_--to know
whether this phantom were a reality, to know above all if it were a
thing of evil or of good: and he could not know unless he could advance
that last final step necessary to fuse the rhythm of separate events
into the sensation of the single whole.
He sat straining all his faculties: the machine whirred and rocked: but
in vain. And at last, feeling desperately hungry, for he had forgotten
to take food with him, he gradually brought back the lever to its
neutral-point.
* * * * * * *
Of course, Mr. Wells would have done it much better than this.
* * * * * * *
And then there would have to be an ending. I think the newspaper man
would take his opportunity to slink off into the laboratory and get on
the machine with the idea of making a scoop for his paper; ... and then
he would put the lever in too violently, and be thrown backwards. His
head hit the corner of a bench, and he remained stunned; but by evil
chance, the handles of the machine still made connection with his body
after the fall. The machine was making him adjust his rhythm to that of
light; so that he was living at an appalling rate. He had gone into the
laboratory late at night. Next morning they found him--dead: and dead
of senile decay--grey-haired, shrivelled, atrophic.
Then of course the machine is smashed up; and Mr. Wells begins to write
another book.
* * * * * * *
I have spent so much time in frivolous discussion of rhythm and size
and commonplaces that I have not pointed out another fundamental fact
of biological relativity--to wit, that we are but parochial creatures
endowed only with sense-organs giving information about the agencies
normally found in our own little environment. Mind without the objects
of mind is the very Chimaera bombinating _in vacuo_.
Out of all the ether waves we are sensitive to an octave as light, and
some few others as heat. X-rays and ultra-violet destroy us, but we
know nothing about them until they begin to give us pain; while the low
swell of Hertzian waves passes by and through us harmless and unheeded.
Electrical sense again we have none.
Imagine what it would be for inhabitants of another planet where
changes in Hertzian waves were the central, pivotal changes in
environment, where accordingly life had become sensitive to “wireless”
and to nought else save perhaps touch--imagine such beings broadcast
upon the face of the Earth. With a little practice and ingenuity they
would no doubt be able to decipher the messages floating through
our atmosphere, would feel the rhythms of the Black Hamitic Band
transmitting Jazz to a million homes, and be able to follow, night by
night, the soporific but benevolent fairy-stories of Uncle Archibald.
I wonder what they would make of it all. They would at intervals,
of course, be bumping into things and people. But would touch and
radio-sense alone make our world intelligible? I wonder....
When we begin trying to quit our anthropocentry and discover what the
world might be like if only we had other organs of body and mind for
its assaying, we must flounder and bump in a not dissimilar fashion.
Even the few senses that we do possess are determined by our
environment. Sweet things are pleasant to us: sugar is sweet: so is
“sugar of lead”--lead acetate; sugar is nutritious, lead acetate a
poison. The biologist will conclude, and with perfect reason, that if
sugar was as rare as lead acetate in nature, lead acetate as common as
sugar, we should then abominate and reject sweet things as emphatically
as we now do filth or acids or over-hot liquids.
But I must pause, and find a moral for my tale; for all will agree that
a moral has been so long out of fashion that it is now fast becoming
fashionable again.
Every schoolboy, as Macaulay would say, knows William of Occam’s
Razor--that philosophical tool of admirable properties:--“Entia non
multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”
We want another razor--a Relativist Razor; and with that we will carry
out barbering operations worthy of another Shaving of Shagpat: we will
shave the Absolute.
The hoary Absolute, enormous and venerable, grey-bearded and
grey-locked--he sits enthroned, wielding tremendous power, filling
young minds with fear and awe.
Up, barbers, and at him! Heat the water of your enthusiasm: lather
those disguising appurtenances. See the tufts collapse into the white
foam--feel the hairy jungles melt away before your steel! And at the
end, when the last hair falls, you will wipe away the lather, and look
upon that face and see--ah, what indeed?
I will not be so banal as to attempt to describe that sight in
detail. You will have seen it already in your mind’s eye: “or else”
(to quote Mr. Belloc)--“or else you will not; I cannot be positive
which.” If not, you never will; if yes, what need to waste more of the
compositor’s time? But of him who forges that razor, who arms those
barbers, who gives them courage for their colossal task, of him shall a
new Lucretius sing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Belloc, H. “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.”
Bergson, H. “Time and Free-Will.”
Carroll, L. “Alice in Wonderland.”
---- ---- “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”
Clerk Maxwell. “Collected Papers.”
Einstein. See Kant.
Hegel. See Einstein.
Kant. See Hegel.
Lear, E. “Nonsense Songs and Stories.”
Lucretius. “De Rerum Natura.”
Macaulay, Lord. “Essays.”
Mee, A. “Children’s Encyclopædia.”
Meredith, G. “The Shaving of Shagpat.”
Occam, W. de. “Opera Omnia.”
Shapley. Proc. Nat. Ac. Sci., 6, 204.
Swift, J. “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Wells, H. G. “The New Accelerator.”
Wheeler, W. M. “Ants” (Columbia University Series).
FOOTNOTES:
[41] Read before the Heretics Club, Cambridge, May 1922.