Four-Dimensional Vistas Part 3

POSSESSION

_The temporary possession of a person's body, or some member of that body, by an alien will, as exemplified in automatic writing and obsession_.

It would doubtless amaze the scientifically orthodox to know how many people habitually and successfully practice the dubious art of automatic writing--not mediums, so-called, but people of refinement and intelligence. Although the messages received in this way may emanate from the subconscious mind of the performer, there is evidence to indicate that they come sometimes from an intelligence discarnate, or from a person remote from the recipient in s.p.a.ce.

If such is indeed the case, if the will is extraneous, how does it possess itself of the nerves and muscles of the hand of the writer?

The Higher s.p.a.ce Hypothesis is of a.s.sistance here. It is only necessary to remember that from the fourth dimension the interior of a solid is as much exposed as the interior of a plane figure is exposed from the region of the third dimension. A four-dimensional being would experience no difficulty, under suitable conditions, in possessing itself of any part of the bodily mechanism of another.

The same would hold true in cases of possession and obsession; for if the bastion of the hand can thus be captured, so also may the citadel of the brain. Certain familiar forms of hypnotism are not different from obsession, the hypnotizer using the brain and body of his subject as though they were his own. All unconsciously to himself, he has called into play four-dimensional mechanics. Many cases of so-called dual personality are more easily explicable as possession by an alien will than on the less credible hypothesis that the character, habits, and language of a person can change utterly in a moment of time.

CLAIRVOYANCE IN s.p.a.cE

_Vision at a distance and the exercise of a superior power of sight_.

Clairvoyance in s.p.a.ce is of various kinds and degrees. Sometimes it consists in the perception of super-physical phenomena--the unfurling of a strange and wonderful land; and again it appears to be a higher power of ordinary vision, a kind of seeing to which the opacity of solids offers no impediment, or one involving spatial distances too great and too impeded for normal physical vision to be effective.

That clairvoyance which consists in the ability to perceive not alone the superficies of things as ordinary vision perceives them, but their interiors as well, is a.n.a.logous to the power given by the X-ray, by means of which, on a fluorescent screen, a man may behold the beating of his own heart. But, if the reports of trained clairvoyants are to be believed, there is this difference: everything appears to them without the distortions due to perspective, objects being seen as though they were inside and not outside of the perceiving organ, or as though the observer were in the object perceived; or in all places at the same time.

Our a.n.a.logy makes all this intelligible. To the flat-man, clairvoyance in s.p.a.ce would consist in that power of perception which we exercise in reference to his plane. From the third dimension the boundaries of plane figures offer no impediment to the view of their interiors, and they themselves in no way impede our vision of surrounding objects. If we a.s.sume that clairvoyance in s.p.a.ce is the perception of the things of our world from the region of the fourth dimension, the phenomena exactly conform to the demands of our a.n.a.logy. It is no more difficult for a four-dimensional intelligence to understand the appearance or disappearance of a body in a completely closed room, or the withdrawal of an orange from its skin, without cutting or breaking that skin, than it is for us to see the possibility of taking up a pencil point from the center of a circle and putting it down outside.

We are under no compulsion to draw a line across the circ.u.mference of the circle in order to enter or leave it. Moreover, the volume of our sensible universe embraced in the clairvoyant's field of view will increase in the same way that a balloonist's view increases in area as he rises above the surface of the earth. To account for clairvoyant vision at a distance, it is of course necessary to posit some perceptive organ other than the eye, but the fact that in trance the eyes are closed, itself demands this a.s.sumption.

CLAIRVOYANCE IN TIME

_The perception of a past event as in process of occurring, or the prevision of something which comes to pa.s.s later_.

No mechanistic explanation will serve to account for this order of clairvoyance since it is inextricably involved in the mystery of consciousness itself. Yet our already overworked a.n.a.logy can perhaps cast a little light even here.

To the flat-man, the third dimension of objects pa.s.sing through his plane translates itself to his experience into _time_. Were he capable of rising in the positive direction of the third dimension, he would have pre-vision, because he would be cognizant of that which had not yet intersected his plane: by sinking in the negative direction, he would have post-vision, because he could re-cognize that which had already pa.s.sed.

Now there are excellent reasons, other than those based on a.n.a.logy, that the fourth-dimensional aspect of things may manifest itself to our ordinary experience, not as spatial extension, but as temporal change. Then, if we conceive of clairvoyance as a transcending by consciousness of our three-dimensional s.p.a.ce, prevision and post-vision would be logically possible as corresponding to the positive and negative of the fourth dimension. This may be made clearer by the aid of a homely ill.u.s.tration.

PISGAH SIGHTS OF LIFE'S PAGEANT

Suppose you are standing on a street corner, watching a procession pa.s.s. You see the pageant as a sequence of objects and individuals appearing into view near by and suddenly, and disappearing in the same manner. This would represent our ordinary waking consciousness of what goes on in the world round about. Now imagine that you walk up the street in a direction opposite to that in which the procession is moving. You then rapidly pa.s.s in review a portion of the procession which had not yet arrived at the point you were a few moments before. This would correspond to the seeing of something before it "happened," and would represent the positive aspect of clairvoyance in time--prevision. Were you to start from your original position, and moving in the direction in which the procession was pa.s.sing, overtake it at some lower street corner, you could witness the thing you had already seen. This would represent post-vision--clairvoyance of the past.

A higher type of clairvoyance would be represented by the sweep of vision possible from a balloon. From that place of vantage the procession would be seen, not as a sequence, but simultaneously, and could be traced from its formation to its dispersal. Past, present and future would be merged in one.

It is true that this explanation raises more questions than it answers: to account in this way for a marvel, a greater marvel must be imagined--that of transport out of one's own "s.p.a.ce." The whole subject bristles with difficulties, not the least of which is that even to conceive of such a thing as prevision all our old ideas about time must be recast. This is being done in the Principle of Relativity, a subject which may appropriately engage our attention next.

V CURVED TIME

TIME FROM THE STANDPOINT OF EXPERIMENT AND OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE

In some moment of "sudden light" what one of us has not been able to say, with Rossetti,

"I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell."

Are such strange hauntings of our House of Life due to the cyclic return of time? Perhaps,--but what is time?

Suppose some one should ask you, "What is an hour?" Your answer might be, "It is the interval marked off by the clock-hand between 1 and 2." "But what if your clock is running down or speeding up?" To this you would probably reply, "The clock is set and corrected by the earth, the sun and the stars, which are constant in their movements." _But they are not_. The earth is known to be running slow, by reason of tide friction, and this is likely to continue until it will revolve on its axis, not once a day, but once a year, presenting always the same face to the sun.

We can only measure time by _uniform_ motion. Observe the vicious circle. Uniform motion means the covering of equal s.p.a.ces in equal times. But how are we to determine our equal times? Ultimately we have no other criterion save the uniform motion of the clock-hand or the star dial. The very expressions, "uniform motion," "equal times,"

beg the whole question of the nature of time.

Let us then, in this predicament, consider time not from the standpoint of experiment, but of conscious experience--what Bergson calls "real duration."

Every point along the line of memory, of conscious experience, has been traced out by that unresting stylus we call "the present moment."

The question of its rate of motion we will not raise, as it is one with which we have found ourselves impotent to deal. We believe on the best of evidence that the conscious experience of others is conditioned like our own. For better understanding let us have recourse to a homely a.n.a.logy: let us think of these more or less parallel lines of individual experience in the semblance of the strands of a skein of flax. Now if, _at the present moment_, this skein were cut with a straight knife at right angles to its length, the cut end would represent the _time plane_--that is, the present moment of all--and it would be the same for all providing that the time plane were flat _But is it really flat_? Isn't the straightness of the knife a mere poverty of human imagination? Existence is always richer and more dramatic than any diagram.

"Line in nature is not found; Unit and universe are round.

In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless and ice will burn."

Undoubtedly the flat time-plane represents with fair accuracy the temporal conditions that obtain in the human aggregate in this world under normal conditions of consciousness, but if we consider our relation to intelligent beings upon distant worlds of the visible universe the conditions might be widely different The time section corresponding to what our straight knife made flat in the case of the flax may be--nay, probably is--strongly curved.

RELATIVITY

This crude a.n.a.logy haltingly conveys what is meant by curved time.

It is an idea which is implicit in the Theory of Relativity. This theory has profoundly modified many of our basic conceptions about the universe in which we are immersed. It is outside the province of this book and beyond the power of its author even so much as to sketch the main outlines of this theory, but certain of its conclusions are indispensable, since they baldly set forth our dilemma in regard to the measurement of s.p.a.ce and time. We can measure neither except relatively, because they must be measured one by the other, and no matter how they vary, these variations always compensate one another, leaving us in the same state of ignorance that we were in before.

Suppose that two intelligent beings, one on Mars, let us say, and the other on the earth, should attempt to establish _the same moment of time_, by the interchange of light signals, or by any other method which the most rigorous science could devise. a.s.sume that they have for this purpose two identically similar and mechanically perfect chronometers, and that every difficulty of manipulation were successfully overcome. Their experiment could end only in failure, and the measure of this failure neither one, in his own place, could possibly know. If, after the experiment, the Martian, chronometer in hand, could be instantly and miraculously transported to the earth, and the two settings compared, they would be found to be different: how different, we do not know.

The reason for the failure of any such experiment anywhere conducted can best be made plain by a crude paraphrase of a cla.s.sic proposition from Relativity. Suppose it is required to determine the same moment of time at two different places on the earth's surface, as must be attempted in finding their difference in longitude. Take the Observatory at Greenwich for one place, and the observatory at Washington for the other. At the moment the sun is on the meridian of Greenwich, the exact time of crossing is noted and cabled to Washington. The chronometer at Washington is set accordingly, and the time checked back to Greenwich. This message arrives two seconds, say, after the original message was sent. Washington is at once notified of this double transmission interval. On the a.s.sumption that HALF of it represents the time the message took to travel from east to west, and the other half the time from west to east again, the Washington chronometer is set one second ahead of the signalled time, to compensate for its part of the loss. When the sun has reached the meridian of Washington, the whole process is repeated, and again as before, half of the time the message has taken to cross and recross the Atlantic is added to the Greenwich record of noon at Washington. The number of hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of a second between these two corrected records represents the difference in solar time between the two places, and incidentally the same moment of time has been established for both--at least, so it would appear.

But is it established? That each message took an equal time to travel each way is pure a.s.sumption, and happens to be a false one.

The accuracy of the result is vitiated by a condition of things to which the Relativists have called attention. Our determination might be defended if Washington and Greenwich could be a.s.sumed to remain at rest during the experiments, and some argument might even be made in its favor if we could secure any cosmic a.s.surance that the resultant motion of the earth should be the same when Greenwich signalled its noon to Washington and Washington its noon to Greenwich.

Our present discussion is merely ill.u.s.trative, or diagrammatic; so we will neglect the velocity of the earth in its...o...b..t round the sun, some forty times greater than that of a cannon ball, and the more uncertain and more vertiginous speed of the whole solar system towards its unknown goal. Let us consider only the rotation of the earth on its axis, the tide-speed of day and night. To fix our idea, this may be taken, in our lat.i.tudes, at eighteen thousand miles per day, or perhaps half the speed of a Mauser rifle bullet.

So fast, then, will Washington have been moving to meet the message from Greenwich. So fast will Greenwich have been retreating from Washington's message.

Now the ultimate effect of motion on the time-determination cannot be calculated along any such simple lines as these. Indeed, it cannot be exactly calculated at all, for we have not all the data.

But there is certainly _some_ effect. Suppose one rows four miles up a river against a current of two miles per hour, at a rowing speed of four miles per hour. This will take two hours, plainly. The return trip with the river's gift of two miles per hour will evidently require but forty minutes. _Two hours and forty minutes_ for the round trip, then, of eight miles.

Now then, to row eight miles in still water, according to our supposition, would have required but _two hours_. But, some one objects, the current must help the return trip as much as it hindered the outgoing! Ah, here is the snare that catches rough-and-ready common sense! How long would the double journey have taken _if the river current had been faster than our rowing speed_?

How shall we schedule our trip if we cannot learn the correct speed, _or if it varies from minute to minute_?

These explanations are necessarily symbolistic rather than demonstrative, but any one who will seriously follow out these lines of thought, or, still better, study the att.i.tude of the hard-headed modern physicist towards our cla.s.sical geometry and mechanics, cannot fail to realize how conventional, artificial--even phantasmal--are the limitations set by the primitive idea of flat s.p.a.ce and straight time.

The inferences which we may draw from our hypothetical experiment are plain. The settings of the two chronometers would be defective, they would not show the same time, but each of them would mark the _local_ time, proper to its own place. There would be no means of detecting the amount of error, since the messages were transmitted by a medium involved with them in their transportation. If only local time can be established, the possibility of a warped time-plane--the curvature of time--is directly opened up. Doubtless it is true that on so relatively minute a scale as is offered by the earth, any deviation from perfect flatness of the time-plane would be so inconsiderable and imperceptible as to make it scientifically negligible; but this by no means follows when we consider our relation to other worlds and other systems.