CREATIVE INVOLUTION
Israel Zangwill, in the papers he contributed once upon a time to
the _Strand Magazine_ and later reunited in a book bearing the
happy title Without Prejudice, spoke of women writers as being
significant chiefly in their self-revelation. What they tell of
themselves is of more value than what they write about. Whether
Mr. Zangwill now believes this matters little in the discussion of
an unusual book by a woman. Perhaps to-day he would open both eyes
widely after reading Creative Involution, by Cora L. Williams,
M. S., with an apposite introduction by Edwin Markham. Miss Williams
deals with no less a bagatelle than the Fourth Dimension of Space
(what we do not know we fear, and fear is always capitalised).
Speculative as is her work, she is not a New-Thoughter, a Christian
Scientist, or a member of any of the other queer rag-tag and bobtail
beliefs and superstitions--fortune-telling, astrology, selling
"futures" in the next life, table-rapping, and such like. Cora
Lenore Williams is an authority in mathematics, as was the
brilliant, unhappy Sonya Kovalevska. Her ideas, then, are not
verbal wind-pudding, but have a basis of mathematics and the
investigations of the laboratory, where "chemists and physicists
are finding that the conduct of certain molecules and crystals
is best explained as a fourth-dimensional activity."
We have always enjoyed the idea of the Fourth Spatial Dimension. The
fact that it is an _x_ in the plotting of mathematicians in general
does not hinder it from being a fascinating theme. J. K. F.
Zoellner, of Leipsic, proved to his own satisfaction the existence
of a Fourth Dimension when he turned an india-rubber ball inside out
without tearing it. Later he became a victim to incurable
melancholy. No wonder. If you have read Cayley, or Abbot's Flatland,
or the ingenious speculations of Simon Newcomb and W. K. Clifford,
you will learn the attractions of the subject. Perpetual motion,
squaring the circle, are only variants of the alchemical pursuit of
the philosopher's stone, the transmutation of the baser metals, the
cabalistic Abracadabra, the quest of the absolute. Man can't live on
machinery alone, and the underfed soul of the past period of
positivism craves more spiritual nourishment to-day. Hasn't the
remarkable mathematician Henri Poincare (author of Science and
Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Method) declared that
between the construction of the spirit and the absolute of truth
there is an abysm caused by free choice and the voluntary
elimination which have necessitated such inferences? Note the word
"free"; free-will is restored to its old and honourable estate in
the hierarchy of thought. The cast-iron determinism of the seventies
and eighties has gone to join the materialistic ideas of Buechner and
Clifford. It is a pluralistic world now, and lordly Intuition--a
dangerous vocable--rules over mere mental processes. (There is, as
George Henry Lewes asserted, profound truth in the Cullen paradox:
_i. e._, there are more false facts than false theories current.)
Science only attains the knowledge of the correspondence and
relativity of things--no mean intellectual feat, by the way--but not
of the things themselves; one must join, adds Poincare, to the
faculty of reasoning the gift of direct sympathy. In a word,
Intuition. Even mathematics as an exact science is not immutable,
and the geometries of Lebatchevsky and Riemann are as legitimate as
Euclid's. And at this point the earth beneath us begins to tremble
and the stars to totter in their spheres. Is the age of miracles
now?
Perhaps music is in the Fourth Dimension. Time may be in two
dimensions. Heraclitus before Bergson compared Time to a river
always flowing, yet a permanent river: if we emerged from this
stream at a certain moment and entered it an hour later, would it
not signify that Time has two dimensions. And where does music stand
in the eternal scheme of things? Are not harmony with its vertical
structure and melody with its horizontal flow proof that music is
another dimension in Time? Miss Williams's notion of the Fourth
Spatial Dimension is a spiritual one. Creative Involution is to
supersede the Darwinian evolution. Again, the interior revolution
described for our salvation in the epistles of the Apostle Paul. All
roads lead to religion. Expel religion forcibly and it returns under
strange disguises, usually as debasing superstitions. Yet religion
without dogma is like a body without a skeleton--it can't be made to
stand upright.
Mathematicians are poets, and religion is the poetry of the poor,
just as philosophy is the diversion of professors. Modern science,
said Mallock, put out the footlights of life's stage when it denied
religion. But matter, in the light of recent experiment, is become
spirit, energy, anything but gross matter. Tyndall might have to
revise the conclusions of his once famous Belfast address in the
presence of radium. Remy de Gourmont said that the essential thing
is to search the eternal in the diverse and fleeting movements of
form. From a macrocosmic monster our gods are become microcosmic;
god may be a molecule, a cell. A god to put in a phial; thus far has
the zigzag caprice of theory attained. And religion is "a sum of
scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties," says
Salomon Reinach in Orpheus. Bossuet did not write his Variations in
vain. All is vanity, even doctrinal fluctuations. Goethe has warned
us that "Man is not born to solve the mystery of Existence; but he
must nevertheless attempt it, in order that he may learn how to keep
within the limits of the Knowable." Goethe detested all "thinking
about thought." Spinoza was his only philosophical recreation.
Man must no longer be egocentric. The collective soul is born. The
psychology of the mob, according to Professor Le Bon, is different
from the psychology of the individual. We know this from the mental
workings of a jury. Twelve otherwise intelligent men put in a
jury-box contaminate each other's will so that their united judgment
is, as a rule, that of a full-fledged imbecile. Mark Twain noted
this in his accustomed humorous (a mordant humour) fashion, adding
that trial by jury was all very well in the time of Alfred the
Great, candle-clocks, and small communities. Miss Williams, who sees
salvation for the single soul in the collective soul--not
necessarily socialistic--nevertheless warns parents against the
dangers in our public-school system, where the individuality of the
child is so often disturbed, if not destroyed, by class teaching.
Mob psychology is always false psychology. The crowd obliterates the
ego. Yet to collective consciousness may belong the future. It is
all very well for Mallock to call war the glorification, the result,
and the prop of limited class interests. (This was years ago.)
Stately, sedate, stable is the class that won't tolerate war; a
class of moral lollipops. War we must have; it is one of the prime
conditions of struggling existence. As belief in some totem, fetich,
taboo is the basis of all superstitions, so the superstition of
yesterday builds the cathedrals of faith to-day. (Read Frazer's
Golden Bough--James Frazer, who is the Darwin of Social
Anthropology.) Happiness requires limitations, as a wine needs a
glass to hold it; and if patriotism is a crime of lese-majesty
against mankind, then be it so. But like the poor, war and
patriotism are precious essences in the scheme of life, and we shall
always have them with us. However, the warning of Miss Williams is a
timely one. At school our children's souls are clogged with bricks
and mortar, instead of being buoyant and individual.
She quotes--and her little volume contains a mosaic of apt
quotations--with evident approbation from Some Neglected Factors in
Evolution, by the late H. M. Bernard, an English thinker: "Organic
life is thus seen advancing out of the dim past upon a series of
waves, each of which can be scanned in detail until we come to that
one on which we ourselves, the organisms of to-day, and the human
societies to which we belong, are swept onward. Here we must
necessarily pause, but can we doubt that the great organic rhythm
which has brought life so far will carry it on to still greater
heights in the unknown future?" Rhythm, measured flow, is the
shibboleth. Zarathustra tells us that man is a discord and hybrid of
plant and ghost. "I teach you Beyond-Man (superman); Man is
something that will be surpassed ... once man was ape, and is ape in
a higher degree than any ape.... Man is a rope connecting animal and
Beyond-Man." "Believe that which thou seest not," cries Flaubert in
his marvellous masque of mythologies ancient and modern, The
Temptation of St. Anthony. Tertullian said the same centuries before
the Frenchman: Believe what is impossible. We all do. Perhaps it is
the price we pay for cognition.
Miss Williams is not a Bergsonian, though she appreciates his
plastic theories. She has a receptive mind. Henri Bergson is a
mystagogue, and all mystagogues are mythomaniacs. He has yet to
answer Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott's three questions: "1. Bergson
says, 'Time is a stuff both resistant and substantial.' Where is the
specimen on which this allegation is founded? 2. Consciousness is to
some extent independent of cerebral structure. Professor Bergson
thinks he is disproving a crude theory of localisation of mental
qualities. Will he furnish evidence of its existence apart from
local structure? 3. Instinct leads us to a comprehension of life
that intellect can never give. Will Professor Bergson furnish
instances of the successes of instinct in biological inquiries where
intellect has failed?" (From Modern Science and the Illusions of
Professor Bergson, 1912.) These "metaphysical curiosities," as they
are rather contemptuously called by Sir Ray Lankester in his preface
to this solidly reasoned confutation, are the pabulum of numerous
persons, dilettantes, with a craving for an embellished theory of
the Grand Perhaps. Miss Williams is not the dupe of such silken
sophistries, and while her divagations are sometimes in the
air--which, like the earth, hath bubbles, as was observed by the
greatest of poets--she plants her feet on tangible affirmations. And
to have faith we must admit the Illative sense of John Henry Newman.
Thus "the wheel is come full circle." Creative Involution will
please mystics and mathematicians alike. The author somersaults in
the vasty blue, but safely volplanes to mother earth.