Part 10 (1/2)
”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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce? 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 s.p.a.ce as an 'empty h.o.m.ogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate const.i.tuents 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 s.p.a.ce.
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 s.p.a.ce. I mean that I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that s.p.a.ce is not an empty h.o.m.ogeneous 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 const.i.tuents were dynamic and mobile, not a mere pa.s.sive medium but a medium in constant movement and change. He claimed to have discovered--by ordinary inductive experiment--that the const.i.tuents of aether possessed certain functions, and moved in certain figures obedient to certain mathematical laws. s.p.a.ce, 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 const.i.tuents of s.p.a.ce 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.