"You don't knock up against things here, and the air is as good as you
want. It can't be the lack of ordinary emptiness you feel."
"I agreed that the word needed explaining. 'I suppose it is mental
restlessness,' I said. 'I like to feel that for a tremendous distance
there is nothing round me. Why, I don't know. Some men are built the
other way and have a terror of space.'
"He said that that was better. 'It is a personal fancy, and depends on
your KNOWING that there is nothing between you and the top of the Dent
Blanche. And you know because your eyes tell you there is nothing.
Even if you were blind, you might have a sort of sense about adjacent
matter. Blind men often have it. But in any case, whether got from
instinct or sight, the KNOWLEDGE is what matters.'
"Hollond was embarking on a Socratic dialogue in which I could see
little point. I told him so, and he laughed. "'I am not sure that I am
very clear myself. But yes--there IS a point. Supposing you knew-not
by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know
the truth of a mathematical proposition--that what we call empty space
was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills
and houses, but with things as real--as real to the mind. Would you
still feel crowded?'
"'No,' I said, 'I don't think so. It is only what we call matter that
signifies. It would be just as well not to feel crowded by the other
thing, for there would be no escape from it. But what are you getting
at? Do you mean atoms or electric currents or what?'
"He said he wasn't thinking about that sort of thing, and began to talk
of another subject.
"Next night, when we were pigging it at the Geant cabane, he started
again on the same tack. He asked me how I accounted for the fact that
animals could find their way back over great tracts of unknown country.
I said I supposed it was the homing instinct.
"'Rubbish, man,' he said. 'That's only another name for the puzzle,
not an explanation. There must be some reason for it. They must KNOW
something that we cannot understand. Tie a cat in a bag and take it
fifty miles by train and it will make its way home. That cat has some
clue that we haven't.'
"I was tired and sleepy, and told him that I did not care a rush about
the psychology of cats. But he was not to be snubbed, and went on
talking.
"'How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not
know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain
or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be
full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A
dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why?
Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to
travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence
than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.'
"But at that point I fell asleep and left Hollond to repeat his
questions to a guide who knew no English and a snoring porter.
"Six months later, one foggy January afternoon, Hollond rang me up at
the Temple and proposed to come to see me that night after dinner. I
thought he wanted to talk Alpine shop, but he turned up in Duke Street
about nine with a kit-bag full of papers. He was an odd fellow to look
at--a yellowish face with the skin stretched tight on the cheek-bones,
clean-shaven, a sharp chin which he kept poking forward, and deep-set,
greyish eyes. He was a hard fellow, too, always in pretty good
condition, which was remarkable considering how he slaved for nine
months out of the twelve. He had a quiet, slow-spoken manner, but that
night I saw that he was considerably excited.
"He said that he had come to me because we were old friends. He
proposed to tell me a tremendous secret. 'I must get another mind to
work on it or I'll go crazy. I don't want a scientist. I want a plain
man.'
"Then he fixed me with a look like a tragic actor's. 'Do you remember
that talk we had in August at Chamonix--about Space? I daresay you
thought I was playing the fool. So I was in a sense, but I was feeling
my way towards something which has been in my mind for ten years. Now
I have got it, and you must hear about it. You may take my word that
it's a pretty startling discovery.'
"I lit a pipe and told him to go ahead, warning him that I knew about
as much science as the dustman.
"I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he
meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty
homogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate
constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and
we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all.
That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers
taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that
view. An animal, for instance. It feels a kind of quality in Space.
It can find its way over new country, because it perceives certain
landmarks, not necessarily material, but perceptible, or if you like
intelligible. Take an Australian savage. He has the same power, and,
I believe, for the same reason. He is conscious of intelligible
landmarks.'
"'You mean what people call a sense of direction,' I put in.
"'Yes, but what in Heaven's name is a sense of direction? The phrase
explains nothing. However incoherent the mind of the animal or the
savage may be, it is there somewhere, working on some data. I've been
all through the psychological and anthropological side of the business,
and after you eliminate the clues from sight and hearing and smell and
half-conscious memory there remains a solid lump of the inexplicable.'
"Hollond's eye had kindled, and he sat doubled up in his chair,
dominating me with a finger.
"'Here, then is a power which man is civilising himself out of. Call
it anything you like, but you must admit that it is a power. Don't you
see that it is a perception of another kind of reality that we are
leaving behind us?... Well, you know the way nature works. The wheel
comes full circle, and what we think we have lost we regain in a higher
form. So for a long time I have been wondering whether the civilised
mind could not recreate for itself this lost gift, the gift of seeing
the quality of Space. I mean that I wondered whether the scientific
modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not
an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences,
intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.'
"I found all this very puzzling and he had to repeat it several times
before I got a glimpse of what he was talking about.
"'I've wondered for a long time he went on 'but now quite suddenly, I
have begun to know.' He stopped and asked me abruptly if I knew much
about mathematics.
"'It's a pity,' he said,'but the main point is not technical, though I
wish you could appreciate the beauty of some of my proofs. Then he
began to tell me about his last six months' work. I should have
mentioned that he was a brilliant physicist besides other things. All
Hollond's tastes were on the borderlands of sciences, where mathematics
fades into metaphysics and physics merges in the abstrusest kind of
mathematics. Well, it seems he had been working for years at the
ultimate problem of matter, and especially of that rarefied matter we
call aether or space. I forget what his view was--atoms or molecules or
electric waves. If he ever told me I have forgotten, but I'm not
certain that I ever knew. However, the point was that these ultimate
constituents were dynamic and mobile, not a mere passive medium but a
medium in constant movement and change. He claimed to have
discovered--by ordinary inductive experiment--that the constituents of
aether possessed certain functions, and moved in certain figures
obedient to certain mathematical laws. Space, I gathered, was
perpetually 'forming fours' in some fancy way.
"Here he left his physics and became the mathematician. Among his
mathematical discoveries had been certain curves or figures or
something whose behaviour involved a new dimension. I gathered that
this wasn't the ordinary Fourth Dimension that people talk of, but that
fourth-dimensional inwardness or involution was part of it. The
explanation lay in the pile of manuscripts he left with me, but though
I tried honestly I couldn't get the hang of it. My mathematics stopped
with desperate finality just as he got into his subject.
"His point was that the constituents of Space moved according to these
new mathematical figures of his. They were always changing, but the
principles of their change were as fixed as the law of gravitation.
Therefore, if you once grasped these principles you knew the contents
of the void. What do you make of that?"
I said that it seemed to me a reasonable enough argument, but that it
got one very little way forward. "A man," I said, "might know the
contents of Space and the laws of their arrangement and yet be unable
to see anything more than his fellows. It is a purely academic
knowledge. His mind knows it as the result of many deductions, but his
senses perceive nothing."
Leithen laughed. "Just what I said to Hollond. He asked the opinion
of my legal mind. I said I could not pronounce on his argument but
that I could point out that he had established no trait d'union between
the intellect which understood and the senses which perceived. It was
like a blind man with immense knowledge but no eyes, and therefore no
peg to hang his knowledge on and make it useful. He had not explained
his savage or his cat. 'Hang it, man,' I said, 'before you can
appreciate the existence of your Spacial forms you have to go through
elaborate experiments and deductions. You can't be doing that every
minute. Therefore you don't get any nearer to the USE of the sense you
say that man once possessed, though you can explain it a bit.'"
"What did he say?" I asked.
"The funny thing was that he never seemed to see my difficulty. When I
kept bringing him back to it he shied off with a new wild theory of
perception. He argued that the mind can live in a world of realities
without any sensuous stimulus to connect them with the world of our
ordinary life. Of course that wasn't my point. I supposed that this
world of Space was real enough to him, but I wanted to know how he got
there. He never answered me. He was the typical Cambridge man, you
know--dogmatic about uncertainties, but curiously diffident about the
obvious. He laboured to get me to understand the notion of his
mathematical forms, which I was quite willing to take on trust from
him. Some queer things he said, too. He took our feeling about Left
and Right as an example of our instinct for the quality of Space. But
when I objected that Left and Right varied with each object, and only
existed in connection with some definite material thing, he said that
that was exactly what he meant. It was an example of the mobility of
the Spacial forms. Do you see any sense in that?"