root of the Riddle of the Universe. We are all trying in one direction
or another to answer this question. As knowledge increases, old
theories become untenable and have to be discarded, and, in their
place, fresh ones are formulated to account for new phases of
phenomena. There seems a general impression, among even thinking
people, that scientists are wedded to, and always trying to find
proofs for, their last theories, but this is not the case. The
endeavour of the true seeker after truth is not so much to discover
fresh facts which coincide with existing theories, as to find
phenomena which cannot be explained thereby; there is indeed more joy
over one fact which does not agree with preconceived theory, than over
ninety-nine facts which are found to fall under that heading. In our
everyday life we have become so accustomed to take for granted that
what we see, hear, or feel by touch must be real, that it is difficult
for the man in the street to realise that our senses woefully deceive
us; that perception without knowledge often leads us astray into false
concepts, and these false concepts lead us into difficulties which
require fresh concepts to be formed, and these again demand further
and more exact knowledge to be applied to perceived phenomena. This
necessity for overcoming difficulties is the greatest incentive we
have for gaining fresh knowledge of our surroundings. Owing to the
fact, as already pointed out, that our sense perceptions are based
upon the appreciation of change or motion, and must therefore be
limited in Time and Space, and that the trueness of our conceptions of
the Reality is dependent upon the knowledge which can be brought to
bear upon those perceptions, we are forced to postulate two aspects of
the Universe; one of these is what may be called the Visible, Finite,
or Physical, which indeed carries the appearance of Reality to our
limited senses, though it has no real existence for us apart from
those senses, and the other is that which transcends our utmost
conception, which we call the Invisible, the Infinite, or Spiritual.
At the outset of all investigation, we are forced to recognise that
the only way we can approach conception of the Infinite is necessarily
in the form of a negative, the negative applying to those things of
which we have cognisance; we carry our thought to the utmost limit
possible with our present knowledge, and, when we have come to a
standstill, we conceive the Infinite to be not that but something
further on. As our knowledge increases by small steps, that something
further on seems ever to be flying from our grasp by mighty strides,
until we are forced to bow our heads and recognise that we are in the
presence of, though still not in sight of, the Reality. A divine
impulse is ever urging us forward to greater conceptions but
shattering our hopes, and giving us a feeling akin to despair, if we
arrogate to ourselves a greater power of conception than we have
knowledge to sustain; we have to approach the study with, indeed, that
feeling of elation which the consciousness of our origin and destiny
wakes within us, giving us a feeling of certainty that we are capable,
in the hereafter, of attaining to the highest summit of knowledge, but
with that humility, in the present, which makes us acknowledge that he
who knows most knows most how little he knows. In this frame of mind
let us now examine our surroundings.
We are living in a world of continuous and multitudinous changes; in
fact, without change, we could have no cognisance of our surroundings,
we should have no consciousness of living. We have become so
accustomed to certain sensations that we are apt to take them, as
facts, and scoff at the suggestion that they are non-realities. I
propose, however, to show that what we perceive are not Realities, and
true conception of our surroundings depends upon the knowledge which
we can bring to bear to interpret the meaning of these sensations. It
is only in response to our conscientious endeavours to form new
concepts that knowledge is being daily revealed to us; the more we
progress in Knowledge the more we see that Perception alone without
Knowledge leads to false concepts, and these in their turn create
fatal obstacles and difficulties to our progress towards the true
appreciation of the Universe. Let me give a few examples.
In early times the Sun and the Stars were seen to revolve round the
Earth once every day, and, without Knowledge of Astronomy, this was
taken for granted as an absolute fact, and was looked upon as a
reality; later on, however, it was noted that the Stars never changed
their relative positions; this necessitated a new concept, namely,
that they were fixed on the inner surface of a huge globe, which was
also revolving. This false concept brought other difficulties into
play, the question arose as to what was beyond the globe, and also the
difficulty that, when the Stars as well as the Sun were found to be
at such enormous distances from the Earth, their rates of motion were
quite inconceivable. Even in the case of the Sun the motion represents
over twenty-five million miles per hour, and the apparent motion of
the Stars is thousands of times faster than Light travels. These
insuperable difficulties were not swept away until, by the advance of
Knowledge, the falsity of Conception, based only upon appearance, was
made manifest, and it was seen that it was the Earth which revolved
and not the Stars. Even then, owing to its supposed antagonism to what
was stated in the Bible, the new Conception was opposed with great
bitterness, it being long looked upon and denounced as a sacrilegious
invention, and anybody daring to promulgate such a doctrine was
threatened with death.
Our present Conception, that the Earth turns round on its axis once
every day, and rolls in its orbit round the Sun once in every year,
may be called a Reality to our finite Senses; but I shall show later
on that, except for the finiteness of our senses and the imperfection
of our Knowledge, the Concept is not a true one. With perfect
Perception and perfect Knowledge we shall see that, apart from the two
limitations or modes under which our physical senses act, there can be
no such thing as Motion, because the very essence of Motion is but
the product of those limitations, namely, Time and Space.
We are so accustomed to take everything for granted, that it may
perhaps seem strange to question whether it can even be asserted that
we have ever seen matter. Let us turn towards a common object in this
room. We catch in our eyes the multitudinous impulses which are
reflected from its surface under circumstances somewhat similar to
those in which a cricketer "fields" a ball; he puts his hand in the
way of the moving ball and catches it, and, knowing the distance of
the batsman, he perhaps recognises, by the hard impact of the ball,
that the batsman has strong muscles, but he cannot be said to _see_
the batsman by that impact, nor can he gain thereby any idea as to his
character. So it is with objective intuition; we direct our eyes
towards an object, and catch thereby rays of light reflected from that
object at different angles, and, by combining all these directions, we
recognise _form_, and come to the conclusion that we are looking at,
say, a chair. The eye also tells us that rays are coming in greater
quantity from some parts of it, and we know that those parts are
_polished_; the eye again catches rays giving higher or lower
frequencies of vibration, and we call that _colour_; our eyes also
tell us that it intercepts certain rays reflected from other objects
in the room, and we know that it is not _transparent_ to light; and
those are our sight perceptions of a wooden chair.
We may go a little further by "pushing," when we know, by the amount
of resistance compared with the power exerted, what force of gravity
is being exerted by and on that chair, and we declare it heavy or
light, but by these means we get no nearer to the knowledge of what
matter is. By tests and reagents we can resolve wood into other forms
which we call Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, &c., which, because
we cannot divide them into any other known substances, we call
"Elements," but we can only look at these in the same way as we are
looking at the chair. Chemists, however, carry us a little further,
and show us that the Elementary substances have not only their likes
and dislikes, but their passionate desires and lukewarmness to others
of their ilk, and, when opportunity offers, they break up with great
violence any ordinary friendship existing between them and their
neighbours, and seize on their coveted prey with a strength of will
surpassing anything experienced in the Organic World; and this new
association they maintain, until they, in their turn, are
dispossessed, or they encounter another substance of still greater
attraction, when they leave their first love and take up new
connections.
I shall touch upon the subject of what matter is later on; meanwhile
let us consider how, owing to our senses being limited by the
considerations of Time and Space, we are surrounded by inconceivables,
and yet it is those very inadequate conceptions which force us to
acquire Knowledge; the greatest incentive we have to pursue our
investigation is, as we have seen, the fact that Perception without
sufficient Knowledge leads us into difficulties. Let me give you two
instances of these inconceivables. Infinite Space is inconceivable by
us, but it is also quite as inconceivable, or perhaps even more so, to
think of Space being limited, and yet we are forced to declare that
one of these two must be true. Again, Matter is either composed of
ultimate bodies, of a certain size which cannot be divided, or is
infinitely divisible; both of these are inconceivable, the latter for
the same reason as that of the Infinity of Space, and the former
because it is inconceivable that the ultimate body could not be
divided into two parts by a sharp edge forced between its two sides,
or by a stronger force than at present holds it together; it has
indeed been suggested as an explanation that, if an atom could be
divided, it might cease to be matter, that its parts would have no
existence, but it is difficult to conceive how two nothings can form
one something.
Another example of Perception leading to a false Concept is our Sense
of Pain; we apply a red-hot coal to the tip of one of our fingers and
our Perception would have us believe that we feel intense pain at the
point of contact, but we know this to be a false Concept, as it can be
shown that the pain is only felt at the brain: there are in
communication with different parts of our body small microscopical
nerve threads, any of which may be severed with a pen-knife close to
the base of the skull, with the result that no pain can then be felt,
although the fingertip is just as much alive and is seen to be burning
away.
Another example is our Sense of Hearing. A musical sound is made up of
a certain number of pushes in a second, but each push is silent. It is
only, as we have seen, a musical sound to our Sense when the pushes
recur at intervals of not more than the sixteenth part of a second.
The prongs of a tuning-fork, vibrating 500 times per second, seem to
be travelling very quickly, but are really only moving at the rate of
10 inches per second, or not much over half a mile per hour, when the
amplitude is the hundredth part of an inch, which gives quite a loud
sound.
Light is also composed of rills in the Ether, but the rill itself is
not Light, it is only Light when these rills strike, with a certain
enormous frequency, on a special organ adapted for, we might say,
counting these frequencies, and if these frequencies fall below that
certain number, or above twice that number per second, there is no
Sense of Sight.
How few people have ever realised what a wonderful Counting Machine
they possess in their organ of Sight! I think the best method I can
adopt, to bring this clearly before you, is to take our tuning-fork,
vibrating 500 times per second, a rapidity which to some will be even
difficult to comprehend, and then ask you to consider how long that
fork must continue to vibrate before it has accomplished the full
number of frequencies, which must necessarily impinge upon the eye in
one second of time, before the phenomenon of sight becomes possible.
That tuning-fork would have not only to continue its vibrations
without diminution for seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, years,
or hundreds of years, but for 30,000 years before it has accomplished
the full number of pulsations which, as Ether waves, must strike the
eye in one second of time, to give the impression of Light; the
calculation is easy, the rills of Red Light are so small that 40,000
of these only cover one inch of length, and light travels 186,000
miles per second. If therefore the number of inches in 186,000 miles
are multiplied by the 40,000, and the product is divided by the 500
times which the tuning-fork vibrates in one second, you have the
number of seconds that tuning-fork must vibrate, before it has
completed the number of impacts which, in one second of time, must
fall on our retina to give us the impression of red light; and that
tuning-fork would have to vibrate nearly twice as long, say 50,000
years, to reach the number of impulses which strike the eye in one
second of time and give the impression of violet light; and between
these two limits are situated the colours--Orange, Yellow, Green,
Blue, and Indigo.
What a marvellous sense then is Sight, when we find that, not only can
it grasp these innumerable vibrations, but can actually differentiate
colours, appreciating as a different colour each increase of about
one-tenth in these multitudinous frequencies; and it is principally by
means of this Sense of Sight that we gain a knowledge of what is
happening around us. And yet what strides we have made in the last two
hundred years to improve upon that instrument! With all its wonderful
capabilities, we shall see later on that the eye is a very imperfect
instrument for seeing very small objects, or even large objects when
at a great distance. With the present compound Microscope, only
developed in the last hundred years, and its apochromatic lenses,
invented only in the last forty years, we are able to see and
photograph objects of a minuteness immeasurably beyond the power of
the human eye, and, with our telescopes, we can see and photograph
stars far beyond the possibility of vision by the unaided eye; and
yet, by the stellar spectroscope, we are actually able to examine and
identify the very atoms of which that distant star is composed, or
rather was composed hundreds of thousands of years ago; we can compare
those atoms with the same atoms in our laboratories, and we find that,
though the former are hundreds of thousands of years older than the
latter, they show absolutely no signs of wear or loss of energy,
though they have been for that enormous time, and are still, pulsating
at the rate of not only millions but billions of times per second; and
though the pulsations they emit have travelled across such a vast
depth of space that the mind cannot even imagine the distance, there
has not been any diminution in the numbers of pulsations per second,
nor the slightest slowing down of the rate of flight at which they
started on their journey from that far-off world. If there had been
the _slightest_ change we could detect it at once by means of the
Spectroscope.
With another instrument we are able, not only to hear but to converse
audibly, as long as we like, with another human being a thousand miles
away, who is also sitting comfortably in his own arm-chair and
speaking to us with as much freedom as though we were both in the same
room. With another instrument we can go further, and exchange
thoughts, in a few seconds, with a being on the other side of the
world, by means of a thin wire that is itself fixed, and does not
move, and we have lately invented another means by which we can do the
same, over several thousands of miles, without even a connecting wire.
With another instrument we have gone far beyond the facility with
which the Printing press enabled us to communicate our thoughts to our
fellow human beings, we can actually imprint our very words and
laughter upon a wax cylinder and send it to the antipodes, and our
friends there, with a similar instrument, can not only hear and
recognise our very voice, but can make that voice repeat our thoughts
audibly, to a thousand others at the same time, and can repeat that
process for hundreds of times without exhausting that voice. With
another instrument we can depict on a film, not only the images of our
friends but their very actions, which may also be sent to any
distance, and the persons, thereon depicted, may be seen by their
relatives alive and going about their everyday employments, with every
movement exact to life. We can cross the Ocean against the wind and
waves by means of harnessed sunbeams, without any exertion of our own,
at the rate of an express train, which train, by the by, is also moved
by the same means; we can dive to the bottom of the sea and journey
there for hours, in perfect safety, without coming to the surface, and
we are even developing wings, or their equivalent, which from
immemorial tradition we were not to possess before we had finished
doing our duty properly in this world and had gained admission to the
next.
We can do all these things, but how ignorant we still are in the
commonest doings of Nature! By giving up our whole lifetime, and
spending millions of pounds, we could never make a grain of wheat or
an acorn, and wherever we turn we find ourselves confronted with
mysteries beyond our power to explain from a finite material
standpoint; even in material vibrations we meet a mystery almost
beyond our power to comprehend. Take for instance those small insects,
of the family of Grasshoppers, which make the primaeval woods of
Central America give out a noise like the roaring of the sea, a
wondrous sound never to be forgotten by those who have heard it. By
means of a kind of rasp one of these insects creates a sound which
Darwin states can be heard to the distance of one mile: these insects
weigh less than the hundredth part of an ounce, and the instrument by
which the noise is made, weighs much less than one-tenth of the total
insect; it is less therefore than one thousandth part of an ounce in
weight, and yet it is found, by calculation, that this small
instrument is actually able to move at the enormous rate of a thousand
vibrations per second and keep in motion for hours, from five to ten
million tons of matter, and it does this so powerfully that every
particle of that enormous bulk of matter gives out a sound audible to
our ears. But even these millions of tons are not its limit of action,
for we know that these vibrations must go on until, in the end, every
particle of matter connected with this earth has been affected by each
of those vibrations.
All our difficulties of understanding the true meaning of these and
other phenomena around us are, as I have already pointed out, caused
by our inability to recognise that vibration or motion has no reality,
it is a pseudo-conception arising from the fact that our senses are
entirely dependent upon the two modes or limitations, Time and Space,
for their very action, and that, as conceptional knowledge is based
upon perceptional knowledge, our very consciousness of living is also
dependent upon these same limitations. We have seen that Motion is
nothing but the product of these two modes of perceptions, and, in my
next Views, I shall examine these elusive limitations, these two
mysteries of Time and Space, the forever and the never-ending; I shall
trace them to the utmost limit of our conception, and try to gain
thereby a clearer insight into the fact, not only that the whole
Physical Universe is but a transient and Space-limited phenomenon, a
thin film which our senses have erected and which divides us from the
Reality, but that, if our power of _introspection_ were fully
developed, we should know that the Reality is nearer and dearer to us,
and has much more to do with us, even in this life, than has the
physical.
VIEW SIX
SPACE
We have seen that our very thoughts, and therefore consciousness of
living, are limited by Time and Space, but we cannot with the utmost
endeavour conceive a limit to Time and Space; they are two twin
sisters, alike in many respects but different in others, and we shall
realise later on that they are readily interchangeable. The sensuous
aspect of Motion is, as we have seen, the time that an object takes to
go over a certain space--namely, what is called the rate at which it
passes from one point to another, and we cannot imagine Motion unless
it contains both of these modes in however small a quantity; we may
have the greatest imaginable space traversed in a moment of time, or
the smallest imaginable space covered in what may be called, for want
of a better word, an eternity, but we still have to postulate what we
call Motion; this, of course, follows from the fact that our thoughts
require both these modes for forming concepts. If we compare our
conception of Matter with that of Time and Space, we see that the two
latter are not separately the object of any sense, but are the modes
or conditions under which all our senses act, to a greater or less
degree, and these conditions cannot therefore carry the same
impression of objectivity to our senses as Matter does, except perhaps
in the sense that all physical phenomena are simply motion, and motion
is the product of both of these limitations but not of either of them
separately.
If we analyse our conceptions of Time and Space we seem forced to
postulate that they are both infinitely divisible and infinitely
extensible; they are both what is called continuous and not discrete,
we cannot conceive any minimum in their division; both duration in
Time and extension in Space can be reduced, as it were, to a
mathematical point; nor can we conceive any maximum in either duration
or extension. They are both therefore comprised in every conception
possible to our consciousness; all parts of Time are time and all
parts of Space are space; there are no holes, as it were, in Space
which are not space, nor intervals in Time which are not time, they
are both complete units; Space cannot be limited except by space, and
Time cannot be limited except by time. So far they are alike, but, on
the other hand, Space is comprised of three dimensions--namely,
length, breadth, and depth, whereas Time has the appearance to us of
comprising one dimension only--namely, length.
Under our present conditions we can only think of one finite subject
at a time, and, at that moment, all other subjects are cancelled. We
can therefore only think of points in Time and Space as situated
beyond, or in front of, other fixed points, which again must be
followed by other points; we cannot fix a point in either so as to
exclude the thought of a point beyond; we can only in fact examine
them in a form of finite sequences.
The Idea of Infinity, which we shall refer to in a later View and show
to be a false conception, is therefore a necessary result of the
limitation of our thoughts; our physical Ego cannot conceive beyond
the Finite as long as we are conscious of living under present
conditions. With every act of perception by our senses, we have
therefore not only intuition of the Visible or Finite, but we become
at the same moment aware of an Invisible Infinite beyond. Time appears
to us as an inconceivable, intangible something, which gives us the
impression of movement without anything that moves it. Space is an
omnipresent, intangible, inconceivable nothing, outside of which
nothing which has existence can be even thought to exist. Let us now
try and get an insight into what we mean by perception of distance in
space.