His first thought was: Well, here I am again. I’ve not been wiped out.
His next, that he hadn’t died at all. He had gone to sleep and was now
dreaming. He was not in the least agitated, nor even surprised.
He found himself alone in an immense grey space, in which there was no
distinguishable object but himself. He was aware of his body as
occupying a portion of this space. For he had a body; a curious,
tenuous, whitish body. The odd thing was that this empty space had a
sort of solidity under him. He was lying on it, stretched out on it,
adrift. It supported him with the buoyancy of deep water. And yet his
body was part of it, netted in.
He was now aware of two figures approaching. They came and stood, like
figures treading water, one on each side of him, and he saw that they
were Elizabeth and Paul Jeffreson.
Then he concluded that he was really dead; dead like Elizabeth and
Jeffreson, and (since they were there) that he was in hell.
Elizabeth was speaking, and her voice sounded sweet and very kind. All
the same he knew he was in hell.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s queer at first, but you’ll get used to
it. You don’t mind our coming to meet you?”
Mr. Spalding said he’d no business to mind, no right to reproach her,
since they were all in the same boat. They had, all three, deserved
their punishment.
“Punishment?” (Jeffreson spoke). “Why, where does he think he is?”
“I’m in hell, aren’t I? If—”
“If _we’re_ here. Is that it?”
“Well, Jeffreson, I don’t want to rake up old unpleasantness, but
after—after what happened, you’ll forgive my saying so, but what else
_can_ I think?”
He heard Jeffreson laugh; a perfectly natural laugh.
“Will _you_ tell him, Elizabeth, or shall I?”
“You’d better. He always respected your intelligence.”
“Well, old chap, if you really want to know where you are, you’re in
heaven.”
“You don’t mean to say so?”
“Fact. I daresay you’re wondering what we’re doing here?”
“Well, Elizabeth—perhaps. But, frankly, Jeffreson, _you_——”
“Yes. How about me?”
“With your record I should have thought you’d even less business here
than I have.”
“Wouldn’t you? I lived on unpaid bills. I drank. I drugged. There was
nothing I didn’t do. What do you suppose I got in on? You’ll never
guess.”
“No. No. I give it up.”
“My love of beauty. You wouldn’t think it, but it seems that actually
counts here, in the eternal world.”
“And Elizabeth, what did she get in on?”
“Her love of me.”
“Then all I can say is,” said Mr. Spalding, “Heaven must be a most
immoral place.”
“Oh, no. Your parochial morality doesn’t hold good here, that’s all. Why
should it? It’s entirely relative. Relative to a social system with
limits in time and space. Relative to a certain biological configuration
that ceased with our terrestrial organisms. Not absolute. Not eternal.
“But beauty—Beauty _is_ eternal, is absolute. And I—I loved beauty more
than credit, more than drink or drugs or women, more even than
Elizabeth.
“And love is eternal. And Elizabeth loved me more than you, more than
respectability, more than peace and comfort, and a happy life.”
“That’s all very well, Jeffreson; and Elizabeth may be all right. Mary
Magdalene, you know, _Quia multum amavit_, and so forth. But if a
blackguard like you can slip into heaven as easily as all that, where
_are_ our ethics?”
“Your ethics, my dear Spalding, are where they’ve always been, where you
came from, not here. And if I _was_ what they call a bad man, that’s to
say a bad terrestrial organism, I was a thundering good poet. You say I
slipped in easily; do you suppose it’s easy to be a poet? My dear
fellow, it requires an inflexibility, a purity, a discipline of mind—of
_mind_, remember—that you haven’t any conception of. And surely _you_
should be the last person in the world to regard mind as an inferior
secondary affair. Anyhow, the consequence is that I’ve not only got into
heaven, I’ve got into one of the best heavens, a heaven reserved
exclusively for the very finest spirits.”
“Then,” said Mr. Spalding, “if we’re in heaven, who’s in hell?”
“Couldn’t say for certain. But we shouldn’t put it that way. We should
say: Who’s gone back to earth?”
“Well—am I likely to meet Uncle Sims, or Aunt Emily, or Tom Rumbold
here? You remember them, Elizabeth?”
“Oh, yes, I remember. They’d be almost certain to be sent back. They
couldn’t stand eternal things. There’s nothing eternal about meanness
and stupidity and nastiness.”
“What’ll happen to them, do you suppose?”
“What should you say, Paul?”
“I should say they’d suffer damnably till they’d got some bigness and
intelligence and decency knocked into them.”
“It’ll be a sell for Aunt Emily. She was brought up to believe that
stupidity was no drawback to getting into heaven.”
“Lots of people,” said Jeffreson, “will be sold. Like my father, the
Dean of Eastminster; he was cocksure he’d get in; but they won’t let
him. And why, do you suppose? Because the poor old boy couldn’t see that
my poems were beautiful.
“But even that wouldn’t have dished him, if he’d had a passion for
anybody; or if he’d cared two straws about metaphysical truth. Your
truth, Spalding.”
“Bless me, all our preconceived ideas seem to have been wrong.”
“Yes. Even I wasn’t prepared for that. By the way, that’s what you got
in on, your passion for truth. It’s like my passion for beauty.”
“But—aren’t you distressed about your father, Jeffreson?”
“Oh, no. He’ll get into some heaven or other some day. He’ll find out
that he cares for somebody, perhaps. Then he’ll be all right— But don’t
you want to look about a bit?”
“I don’t see very much to look at. It strikes me as a bit bare, your
heaven.”
“Oh, that’s because you’re only at the landing-state.”
“The landing _what_?”
“State. What we used to call landing place. Times and spaces here, you
know, are states. States of mind.”
Mr. Spalding sat up, excited. “But—but that’s what I always said they
were. I and Kant.”
“Well, you’d better talk to him about it.”
“Talk to _him_? Shall I see Kant?”
“Look at him, Elizabeth. _Now_ he’s coming alive— Of course you’ll see
him when you get into your own place—state, I mean. You’d better get up
and come along with me and Elizabeth. We’ll show you round.”
[Illustration: “_Now_ he’s coming alive—”]
He rose, they steadied him, and he made his way between them through the
grey immensity, over a half-seen yet perfectly solid tract of something
that he thought of, absurdly, as condensed space. As yet there were no
objects in sight but the figures of Elizabeth and Jeffreson; the
half-seen, yet tangible floor he went on seemed to create itself out of
nothing, under his feet, as the desire to walk arose in him. And as yet
he had felt no interest or curiosity; but as he went on he was aware of
a desire to see things that became more and more urgent. He would see.
He must see. He felt that before him and around him there were endless
things to be seen. His mind strained forwards towards vision.
And then, suddenly, he saw.
He saw a landscape more beautiful than anything he could have imagined.
It was, Jeffreson informed him, very like the umbrella pine country
between Florence and Siena. As they came out of it on a great, curving
road they had their faces towards the celestial west. To the south the
land fell away in great red cliffs to a shining, blue sea. Like,
Jeffreson said, the Riviera, the Estérel. West and north the landscape
rolled in green hill after green hill, pine-tufted, to a sweeping
rampart of deep blue; such a rampart, such blue as Mr. Spalding had seen
from the heights above Sidmouth, looking towards Dartmoor. Only this
country had a grace, a harmony of line and colour that gave it an
absolute beauty; and over it there lay a serene, unearthly radiance.
Before them, on a hill, was an exquisite little white, golden and
rose-red town.
“You may or may not believe me,” said Jeffreson, “but the beauty of all
this is that I made it. I mean Elizabeth and I made it between us.”
“You made it?”
“Made it.”
“How?”
“By thinking of it. By wanting it. By imagining it.”
“But—out of what?”
“I don’t know and I don’t much care. Our scientists here will tell you
we made it out of the ultimate constituents of matter. Matter, unformed,
only exists for us in its ultimate constituents. Something like
electrons of electrons of electrons. Here we are all suspended in a web,
immersed, if you like, in a sea, an air of this matter. It is utterly
plastic to our imagination and our will. Imperceptible in its unformed
state, it becomes visible and tangible as our minds get to work on it,
and we can make out of it anything we want, including our own bodies.
Only, so far as our imaginations are still under the dominion of our
memories, so far will the things they create resemble the things we knew
on earth. Thus you will notice that while Elizabeth and I are much more
beautiful than we were on earth” (he _had_ noticed it), “because we
desired to be more beautiful, we are still recognizable as Paul and
Elizabeth because our imaginations are controlled by our memories. You
are as you always were, only younger than when we knew you, because your
imagination had nothing but memory to go on. Everything you create here
will probably be a replica of something on earth you remember.”
“But if I want something new, something beautiful that I haven’t seen
before, can’t I have it?”
“Of course you can have it. Only, just at first, until your own
imagination develops, you’ll have to come to me or Turner or Michael
Angelo to make it for you.”
“And will these things that you and Turner and Michael Angelo make for
me be permanent?”
“Absolutely, unless we unmade them. And I don’t think we should do that
against your will. Anyhow, though we can destroy our own works we can’t
destroy each other’s, that is to say, reduce them to their ultimate
constituents. What’s more, we shouldn’t dream of trying.”
“Why not?”
“Because old motives don’t work here. Envy, greed, theft, robbery,
murder, or any sort of destruction, are unknown. They can’t happen.
Nothing alters matter here but mind, and I can’t will your body to come
to pieces so long as you want it to keep together. You can’t destroy it
yourself as you can other things you make, because your need of it is
greater than your need of other things.
“We can’t thieve or rob for the same reason. Things that belong to us
belong to our state of mind and can’t be torn away from it, so that we
couldn’t remove anything from another person’s state into our own. And
if we could we shouldn’t want to, because each of us can always have
everything he wants. If I like your house or your landscape better than
my own, I can make one for myself just like it. But we don’t do this,
because we’re proud of our individualities here, and would rather have
things different than the same— By the way, as you haven’t got a house
yet, let alone a landscape, you’d better share ours.”
“That’s very good of you,” Mr. Spalding said. He was thinking of Oxford.
Oxford. Quiet rooms in Balliol. He seemed to hesitate.
“If you’re still sitting on that old grievance of yours, I tell you,
once for all, Spalding, I’m not going to express any regret. I’m _not_
sorry, I’m glad I took Elizabeth away from you. I made her more happy
than unhappy even on earth. And please notice it’s I who got her into
heaven, not you. If she’d stayed with you and hated you, as she would
have done, she couldn’t have got in.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” said Mr. Spalding. “I was only wondering
where I could put my landscape.”
“How do you mean—‘put’ it?”
“Place it—so as not to interfere with other people’s landscapes.”
“But how on earth could you interfere? You ‘place’ it, as you call it,
in your own space and in your own time.” His own space, his own time—Mr.
Spalding got more and more excited.
“But—how?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you how. It simply happens.”
“But I want to understand it. I—I _must_ understand.”
“You shouldn’t put him off like that, Paul,” Elizabeth said. “He always
did want to understand things.”
“But when I don’t understand them myself—”
“You’d better take him to Kant, or Hegel.”
“I should prefer Kant,” said Mr. Spalding.
“Well, Kant then. You’ll have to get into his state first.”
“How do I do that?”
“It’s very simple. You just think him up and ask him if you can come
in.”
Elizabeth explained. “Like ringing somebody up, you know, and asking if
you can come and call.”
“Supposing he won’t let me.”
“Trust him to say so. Of course, we mayn’t get through. He may have
_thought off_.”
“You can think off, can you?”
“Yes, that’s how you protect yourself. Otherwise life here would be
unbearable. Just keep quiet for a second, will you?”
There was an intense silence. Presently Jeffreson said: “Now you’re
through.”
And Mr. Spalding found himself in a white-washed room, scantily
furnished with three rows of bookshelves, a writing-table, a table set
with mysterious instruments, and two chairs. A shaded lamp on the
writing-table gave light. Mr. Spalding had left the umbrella pine
country blazing with sunlight, but it seemed that Kant’s time was
somewhere about ten o’clock at night. The large window was bared to a
dark-blue sky of stars.
A little, middle-aged man sat at the writing-table. He wore
eighteenth-century clothes and a tie wig. The face that looked up at Mr.
Spalding was lean and dried, the mouth tight, the eyes shining distantly
with a deep, indrawn intelligence. Mr. Spalding understood that he was
in the presence of Immanuel Kant.
“You thought me up?”
“Forgive me. I am James Spalding, a student of philosophy. I was told
that you might, perhaps, be willing to explain to me the—the very
extraordinary conditions in which I find myself.”
“May I ask, Mr. Spalding, if you have paid any particular attention to
_my_ philosophy?”
“I am one of your most devoted disciples, sir. I refuse to believe that
philosophy has made any considerable advance since the Critique of Pure
Reason.”
“T-t-t. My successor, Hegel, made a very considerable advance. If you
have neglected Hegel—”
“Pardon me, I have not. I was once Hegel’s devoted disciple. An
entrancing fantasy, the Triple Dialectic. But I came to see that yours,
sir, was the safer and the saner system, and that the recurrent tendency
of philosophy must be back to Kant.”
“Better say Forward with him. If you are indeed my disciple, I do not
think that conditions here should have struck you as extraordinary.”
“They struck me as an extraordinary confirmation of your theory of space
and time, sir.”
“They are that. They are that. But they go far beyond anything I ever
dreamed of. It was not in my scheme that the Will—to which, if you
remember, I gave a purely ethical and pragmatical rôle—that the Will and
the imagination of individuals, of you and me, Mr. Spalding, should
create their own space and time, and their own objects in space and
time. I did not anticipate this multiplicity of spaces and times. In my
time there was only one space and one time for everybody.
“Still, it is a very remarkable confirmation, and you may imagine, Mr.
Spalding, that I was gratified when I first came here to find everybody
talking and thinking correctly about time and space. You will have
noticed that here we say state, meaning state of consciousness, where we
used to say place. In the same way we talk about states of time, meaning
time as a state of consciousness. My present state, you will observe, is
exactly ten minutes past ten by my clock, which is my consciousness. My
consciousness registers time automatically. My own time, mind you, not
other people’s.”
“But isn’t that frightfully inconvenient? If your time isn’t everybody
else’s time, how on earth—I mean how in heaven—do you keep your
appointments? How do you co-ordinate?”
“We keep appointments, we co-ordinate, exactly as we used to do, by a
purely arbitrary system. We measure time by space, by events, movements
in space-time. Only, whereas under earthly conditions there was
apparently one earth and one sun, one day and one night for everybody,
here everybody has his own earth, his own sun and his own day and night.
So we are obliged to take an ideal earth and sun, an ideal day and
night. Their revolutions are measured exactly as we measured them on
earth, by the movements of hands on a dial marking minutes and hours.
Only our public clocks have five hands marking the revolutions of weeks,
months and years. That is our public standardized time, and all
appointments are kept, all scientific calculations made by it. The only
difference between heaven and earth is that here public space-time is
regarded as it really is—an unreal, a purely arbitrary and artificial
convention. We know, not as a result of philosophic or mathematical
reasoning, but as part of our ordinary conscious experience, that there
is no absolute space and no absolute time. I would say no _real_ space
and no real time, but that in heaven a state of consciousness carries
its own reality with it as such; and the time state or the space state
is as real as any other.
“Of course, without an arbitrary public space-time, a public clock,
states of consciousness from individual to individual could never be
co-ordinated. For example, you have come straight from Mr. Jeffreson’s
twelve-noon to my ten o’clock p.m. But the public clock, which you will
see out there in the street—we are in Königsberg; I have no visual
imagination and must rely entirely on memory for my scenery—the public
clock, I say, marks time at a quarter to eight; and if I were asking Mr.
Jeffreson to spend the evening with me, the hour would be fixed for us
by public time at eight. But he would find himself in my time at ten.
“Now I want to point out to you, Mr. Spalding, that this way of
regarding space and time is not so revolutionary as it may appear. I
said, if you remember, that under terrestrial conditions there was
apparently one earth and one sun, one day and night for everybody. But
really, even then, everybody carried about with him his own private
space and time, and his own private world in space and time. It was
only, even then, by an arbitrary system of mathematical conventions,
mostly geometrical, that all these private times and spaces were
co-ordinated, so as to constitute one universe. Public clock time, based
on the revolutions of bodies in a mathematically determined public
space, was as conventional and relative an affair on earth as it is in
heaven.
“Our private consciousnesses registered their own times automatically
then as now, by the passage of internal events. If events passed
quickly, our private time outran clock time; if they dragged, it was
behindhand.
“Thus in dream experience there are many more events to the second than
in waking experience; and consciousness registers by the tick-tick of
events, so that in a dream we may live through crowded hours and days in
the fraction of time that coincides with the knock on the door that
waked us. It is absurd to say that in this case we do not live in two
different time-systems.”
“Yes, and—” Mr. Spalding cried out excitedly—
“Einstein has proved that motion in public space-time is a purely
relative and arbitrary thing, and that the velocity, or time value, of a
ray of light moving under different conditions is a constant; when on
any theory of absolute time and absolute motion it should be a variant.”
“That,” said Kant, “is no more than I should have expected.”
“You said, sir, that the only distinction between earthly and heavenly
conditions is that this artificial character of standardized space-time
is recognized in heaven and not on earth. I should have said that the
most striking differences were, firstly, that in heaven our experience
is created for us by our imagination and our will, whereas on earth it
was, in your own word, sir, ‘given.’ Secondly that in heaven our states
are not closed as they were on earth, but that anybody can enter anybody
else’s. It seems to me that these differences are so great as to surpass
anything in our experience on earth.”
“They are not so great,” said Kant, “as all that. In dreaming you
already had an experience of a world created by each person for himself
in a space and time of his own; a world in which you transcended the
conditions of ordinary space and time. In telepathy and clairvoyance you
had experience of entering other people’s states.”
“But,” Mr. Spalding said, “on earth my consciousness was dependent on a
world apparently outside it, arising presumably in God’s consciousness,
my body being the ostensible medium. Here, on the contrary, I have my
world inside me, created by my consciousness, and my body is not so much
a medium as an accessory after the fact.”
“And what inference do you draw, Mr. Spalding?”
“Why, that on earth I was nearer God, more dependent on him than in
heaven. I seem to have become my own God.”
“Doesn’t it strike you that in becoming more god-like you are actually
nearer God? That in this power of your imagination to conceive, this
freedom of your will to create your universe, God is cutting a clearer
path for himself than through that constrained and obstructed
consciousness you had on earth?”
“That’s it. When I think of that appalling life of earth, the pain, sir,
the horrible pain, the wickedness, the imbecility, the endless
struggling through blood and filth, and being beaten, I can’t help
wondering how such things can exist in the Absolute, and why the
Absolute shouldn’t have put us—or as you would say, _thought_ us into
this heavenly state from the beginning.”
“Do you suppose that any finite intelligence—any finite will could have
been trusted, untrained, with the power we have here? Only wills
disciplined by struggling against earth’s evil, only intelligences
braced by wrestling with earth’s problems are fitted to create
universes. You may remember my enthusiasm for the moral law, my
Categorical Imperative? It is not diminished. The moral law still holds
and always will hold on earth. But I see now it is not an end in itself,
only the means to which this power, this freedom is the end.
“That is how and why pain and evil exist in the Absolute. It is obvious
that they cannot exist in it as such, being purely relative to states of
terrestrial organisms. That is why the comparatively free wills of
terrestrial organisms are permitted to create pain and evil.
“When you talk of such things existing in the Absolute, unchanged and
unabridged, you are talking nonsense. You are thinking of pain and evil
in terms of one dimension of time and three dimensions of space, by
which they are indefinitely multiplied.”
“How do you mean—one dimension of time?”
“I mean time taken as linear extension, the pure succession of past,
present and future. You think of pain and evil as indefinitely
distributed in space and indefinitely repeated in time, whereas in the
idea, which is their form of eternity, at their worst they are not many,
but one.”
“That doesn’t make them less unbearable.”
“I am not talking about that. I am talking about their significance for
eternity, or in the Absolute, since you said that was what distressed
you.
“You will see this for yourself if you will come with me into the state
of three dimensional time.”
“What’s that?” said Mr. Spalding, deeply intrigued. “That,” said the
philosopher, “is time which is not linear succession, time which has
turned on itself twice to take up the past and future into its present.
For as the point is repeated to form the line of space, so the instant
is repeated to form the linear time of past, present, future. And as the
one-dimensional line turns at right angles to itself to form the
two-dimensional plane, so linear or one-dimensional time turns on itself
to form two-dimensional or plane time, the past-present, or
present-future. And as the plane turns on itself to form the cube, so
past-present and present-future double back to meet each other and form
cubic time, or past-present-future all together.
“This is the three dimensional state of consciousness we shall have to
think ourselves into.”
“Do you mean to say that if we get into it we shall have solved the
riddle of the universe?”
[Illustration]
“Hardly. The universe is a tremendous jig-saw puzzle. If God wanted to
keep us amused to all eternity, he couldn’t have hit on anything better.
We shall not be able to stay very long, or to take in _all_
past-present-future at once. But you will see enough to realize what
cubic time is. You will begin with one small cubic section, which will
gradually enlarge until you have taken in as much cubic time as you can
hold together in one duration.
“Look out through that window. You see that cart coming down the street.
It will have to pass Herr Schmidt’s house opposite and the ‘Prussian
Soldier,’ and that grocer’s shop and the clock before it gets to the
church.
“Now you’ll see what’ll happen.”