Science and the Infinite Part 4

Let us use this to continue our voyage. On a clear night the human eye can perceive thousands of stars, in all directions, scattered without any apparent order or design; but in one locality, forming a huge ring round the heavens, there is a misty zone called the Milky Way. Let us turn a telescope with a low aperture on this, and what a sight presents itself! Instead of mist, myriads of stars are now seen surrounded by nebulous haze. We put a higher aperture on, and thus pierce further and further into s.p.a.ce; the haze is resolved into myriads more stars, and more haze comes up from the deep beyond, showing that the visual ray was not yet strong enough to fathom the mighty distance; but let the full aperture be applied and mark the result. Mist and haze have disappeared; the telescope has pierced right through the stupendous distance, and only the vast abyss of s.p.a.ce, boundless and unfathomable, is seen beyond.

Let us pause here for a moment to think what we have done. Light, travelling with its enormous velocity, requires on an average considerably over ten years to traverse the distance between our Solar System and Stars of the first magnitude, but the dimensions of the Milky Way are built up on such a huge scale that to traverse the whole stratum would require us to pa.s.s about 500 stars, separated from each other by this same tremendous interval; 10,000 years may therefore be computed as the shortest time which light, travelling with its enormous velocity, would take to sweep across the whole cl.u.s.ter, it being borne in mind that the Solar System is supposed to be located not far from the centre of this great star cl.u.s.ter, and that the cl.u.s.ter comprises all stars visible arrayed in a flat zone, the edges of which, where the stratum is deepest, being the locality of the Milky Way.

Let us once more continue our journey. We have traversed a distance which even on the wings of light we could only accomplish in many thousands of years, and now stand on the outskirts of our great star cl.u.s.ter, in the same way, and I hope with the same aspirations, as when we paused the last time on the confines of our Solar System.

Behind us are myriads of shining orbs, in such countless numbers that human thought cannot even suggest a limit, and yet each of these is a mighty globe like our Sun, the centre of a planetary system, dispensing light and heat under conditions similar to what we are accustomed to here. Let us, however, turn our face away from these cl.u.s.terings of mighty suns, and look steadfastly forward into the unbroken darkness, and once more brace our nerves to face that terrible phantom--_Immensity_.

We require now the most powerful instruments that science can put into our hands, and by their aid we will again essay to make another stride towards the appreciation of our subject. In what, to the unaided eye, was unbroken darkness, the telescope now enables us to discern a number of luminous points of haze, and towards one of these we continue our journey. The myriads of suns in our great star cl.u.s.ter are soon being left far behind; they shrink together, resolve themselves into haze, until the once glorious universe of countless millions of suns has dwindled down to a mere point of light, almost invisible to the naked eye. But look forward: the luminous cloud to which we are urging our flight has expanded, until what, at one time, was a mere patch of brightness, has now swelled into a mighty star cl.u.s.ter; myriads of suns burst into sight--we have traversed a distance which even on the wings of light would take hundreds of thousands of years, and have reached the confines of another Milky Way as glorious and mighty as the one we have left; whose limits light would require 10,000 years to traverse; and yet, in whatever direction the telescope is placed, star cl.u.s.ters are to be seen strewn over the surface of the heavens.

Let us take now the utmost limit of telescopic power in all directions. Where are we after all but in the centre of a sphere whose circ.u.mference is 100,000 times as far from us as one of the nearest fixed stars, a distance that light would take over a million years to traverse, and beyond whose circuit, infinity, boundless infinity, still stretches unfathomed as ever? We have made a step, indeed, but perhaps only towards acquaintance with a new order of infinitesimals.

Once the distances of our Solar System seemed almost infinite quant.i.ties; compare them with the intervals between the fixed stars, and they become no quant.i.ties at all. And now when the s.p.a.ces between the stars are contrasted with the gulfs of dark s.p.a.ces separating firmaments, they absolutely vanish away. Can the whole firmamental creation in its turn be nothing but a corner of some mightier scheme?

But let us not go on to bewilderment: we have pa.s.sed from planet to planet, star to star, universe to universe, and still infinite s.p.a.ce extends for ever beyond our grasp. We have gone as far towards the infinite as our sight, aided by the most powerful telescope, can hope to go. Is there no way then by which we can continue our journey further towards the appreciation of this infinity? A few years ago we should probably have denied that it was possible for man to go further; but quite lately a new method of observation has been developed, and we will try and use this to continue our flight.

The reason why, to our sight, an object becomes apparently smaller and smaller as it is withdrawn from the eye, until it at last disappears entirely, is that the eye is a very imperfect instrument for viewing objects at a great distance; it can only form an image of an object when that object is near enough to subtend a certain angle, or, in popular language, to show itself a certain size--the rays of light must converge--in fact, the eye cannot single out and appreciate parallel rays: could it do this, objects would not appear to grow smaller as they are removed. A pencil might be removed to the Moon, 240,000 miles away, and would still appear to the eye the same size as it does here close to you; with perfect vision there would be no such thing as perspective, but, with our present conditions of sight, the result would be inconvenient. We should never be able to see, at one and the same time, anything larger than the pupil of our eye. The beauties of the landscape would be gone, and our dearest friends would pa.s.s us unheeded and unseen; everyday life would resolve itself into a task similar to that of attempting to read our newspaper every morning by means of a powerful microscope; we should commence by getting on to a big black blotch, and, after wandering about for half an hour, we might perhaps then begin to find out that we were looking at the little letter "e," but anything like reading would be quite out of the question. We may, therefore, with our limited aperture of sight, be thankful that our eyes have the imperfection of not appreciating parallel rays. But we will now consider how this imperfection may be remedied by science.

There are two different ways of doing this--viz., first, by increasing the amount of light received, by means of telescopes of great aperture; and secondly, by employing an artificial retina a thousand times more sensitive than the human. Now, the human retina receives the impression of what it looks at in a very minute fraction of a second, provided of course that the eye is properly focussed, and no further impression will be made by keeping the eye fixed on that object; but in celestial photography, when the telescope is turned into a camera, the sensitive plate, having received the impression in the first second, may be exposed not only for many seconds, or minutes, or hours, but for an aggregate of even days by re-exposure, every second of which time details on that plate new objects, sunk so deep in the vast depths of s.p.a.ce as to be immeasurably beyond the power of the human eye, even through telescopes hundreds of times more powerful than the largest instruments that science has enabled us to construct; and yet here is laid before us a faithful chart, by means of which we may once more continue our journey through s.p.a.ce. A short exposure will show us firmaments and nebulae just outside the range of our greatest telescopes, and every additional second extends our vision by such vast increases of distances that the brain reels at the thought; and yet, as we have seen, exposures of these sensitive plates may be, and have been, made not only for seconds, but for thousands and even hundreds of thousands of seconds! And still there is no end, no end where the weary mind can rest and contemplate; the finite mind of man can only cry out that there is no limit. In spite of all its strivings and groping by aid of speculative philosophy, the finite cannot attain to the Infinite, nor get any nearer to where the mighty sea of time breaks in noiseless waves on the dim sh.o.r.e of eternity.

In this journey through s.p.a.ce we have apparently exhausted our power of conception of the _extension_ of this View. Although we have travelled in one direction only, our flight was applicable to every possible known direction _outwards_ into the vast abyss of Infinite s.p.a.ce. But there is another path, by which we can also travel with profit to our understanding of this subject, running in the opposite direction--namely, _inwards_. Just as the outward journey seemed to take us towards the appreciation of what our finite senses call the infinitely great, so does this other path appear to intend to infinity, in the opposite direction, leading us to appreciate what is called the infinitely small. We have already considered this direction in View One, under the heading of "Relativity," and by combining these two experiences, we may see still more clearly that our very conception of s.p.a.ce is one of the modes only under which motion or physical phenomena are presented to our consciousness.

VIEW SEVEN

TIME

In the last View I referred to the mysteries of Time and s.p.a.ce as twin-sisters; they have, as we saw, many aspects in common, and are the two modes or conditions under which all our senses act and by which our thoughts are limited. We arbitrarily divide each of these two mysteries into two parts, which parts are separated from each other, in either case, by a point which has, apparently, as its centre, our very consciousness of living. In the case of s.p.a.ce we call this point the HERE, and on one side of it, as we saw in our last View, we have extension towards the infinitely great, and, on the other, intension towards the infinitely small. In the case of Time we call the middle point the NOW, and on one side of this we place the duration of Time towards the future, and, on the other, we place what we call the duration of Time towards the past. In the case of s.p.a.ce we have the here and the _overthere_, equivalent in Time to the present and the _future_, but, though Time and s.p.a.ce are, as it were, twin-sisters, upon whose combined action depends our very consciousness of living, we do not treat them both equally.

It is a remarkable fact that the human race on this particular world has, in some inexplicable way, come to look upon the future as non-existent until we arrive at, and are able to perceive, with our senses, what is happening there; this is all the more inexplicable when we realise that in traversing s.p.a.ce we certainly have to _move_ to get anywhere, but in traversing Time we have nothing equivalent to movement. This curious way of looking upon the future as non-existent, may be another sign that our race is still in its infancy, but is more probably caused by human beings having always. .h.i.therto looked upon Time not only as a reality but as actually moving or extending along a line from past to future eternity; whereas, under our present outlook, we have no consciousness of the existence of Time except by intervals between successive thoughts; our consciousness of the very existence of Time is based upon our Physical Ego repeating the _present_, by saying to itself the words, Now--Now--Now; but there is nothing that can be called movement in this, any more than if you are standing still and saying, Here--Here--Here--relating to s.p.a.ce. Time is, as it were, "marking time," and as the present in time is common to all s.p.a.ce, Time is "marking time" everywhere, and the Now therefore includes the whole of the past and the whole of future eternity everywhere. We shall get a clearer understanding of this later on; meanwhile, we are face to face with the fact that we look upon the future as non-existent.

This curious state of things is probably only accidental to the present stage of development of the human mind, and may, at any time, be rectified by perhaps either a slight rearrangement of that slender network of nerves upon which depends our faculty of thinking, or the joining together of a few microscopical filaments attached to the cells in the grey cortical layer, or even a single bridge thrown across from one convolution to another of the brain; a very slight alteration would open up to our consciousness the present existence of the future. The prime perceivable difference between our brains and those of the Apes and lower animals is the larger number of enfoldments, or convolutions, that are developed by the Human. Each new line of thought, or sequence of thoughts, requires, and is provided with, a new wrinkle or small convolution, and it probably only requires the attention of the human race to be fixed, for a time, on the consideration of this subject, to evolve the slight alteration, or bridge, necessary to enable us to see that the future, as also the past, does actually exist and is included in the Now. It may make this a little clearer to consider that if you maintain that, in traversing the duration of time, the future does not exist until you arrive there, you should also in fairness insist that, in travelling through the extension of s.p.a.ce, your destination, say Rome, does not exist until you get there and can see it with your senses.

As we have, in the former six Views, been gradually mounting above the mists and illusions of our everyday thoughts, and can look through our Window with, I hope, a clearer vision, I shall venture in this present View to carry the subject of the _Future_ still further, and show that, just as we have now before us and can read the papyri which were written 5000 years ago, so it is possible to conceive that books, written and being written and printed 5000 years hence, are _at present_ in existence, and that it is even possible the human race has actually already read them; whether we shall be able to see them and read them in our own lifetime may be open to question; that may again depend upon the development of special cross-circuiting of brain filaments. Meanwhile, in order to carry our present View to the utmost limit of our conception, in a manner somewhat similar to what we did for s.p.a.ce, I will again ask you to join me in a thought-flight towards the appreciation of this second great Mystery.

With this object in view we will first consider the human senses of sight and hearing, commencing with sound, or the vibrations which affect the tympanum of the human ear. Sound travels in air at about 1130 feet per second, and if the vibrating body, giving out the sound, oscillates sixteen times in one second, it follows that, spreading over this 1130 feet, there will be sixteen waves, giving a length of about 70 feet to each wave. This is the lowest sound that the human ear can appreciate as a musical note, and is, what may be called, the fourth Octave above one vibration in one second. When the number of vibrations in a second sinks below sixteen, the ear no longer appreciates them as a musical sound, but is able to hear them as separate vibrations or beats. The easiest way of ill.u.s.trating this is by means of a revolving disc, with sixteen holes pierced at regular intervals round the edge, and a jet of high-pressure air, which is forced through each of the holes successively as they revolve. When the disc does not quite complete one revolution in a second, only fifteen puffs come to the ear in a second of time, and they are heard as puffs; but when the rate reaches one revolution in a second, the sound, as if by magic, changes into the lowest musical sound. The same result may be obtained in a more p.r.o.nounced form by means of explosions or pistol shots; when these are slow and heard separately, they are painful and almost unbearable to the ear, but, as soon as their rapidity, namely, at sixteen per second, gets beyond the power of the ear to differentiate between the explosions, the impression, as if by magic, changes into a continuous or musical sound, like a thirty-foot pipe note of an organ.

To go back to our disc. The octave above this lowest musical note is obtained by doubling the rate of puffs, namely, by revolving the disc twice in one second, and the next octave by revolving four times in a second, and so on, doubling each time, until, at about the thirteenth octave, the sound has become so high that the majority of listeners cannot hear it, and fancy it must have stopped, whereas a few will still be saying: "How shrill it is!" At last, at about the fourteenth octave, when there are 20,000 beats to the second and each wave is about half an inch long, it pa.s.ses beyond human audition, and, although we can show that the air is still vibrating, all is silent, the human ear being incapable of hearing so many beats in a second even as a continuous sound, though I have evidence to show that many insects can hear probably considerably beyond this limit. It is, however, possible to make these higher vibrations perceptible to our senses by means of what are called sensitive flames: we can actually, by these, measure the length of these silent waves, and as we know the rate at which they travel, we can at once compute the number which occur in a second of time, and thus ascertain their pitch. By this means we can follow for about three more octaves above the audible limit, namely, up to 160,000 pulsations per second, with a length of wave of one-twelfth of an inch.

Two and a half octaves above these numerically, _i.e._ at about the twentieth octave, we reach the frequency of Electro-Magnetic Rills, used by the Marconi System of wireless telegraphy, which pulsate at about 950,000 per second, and have a wave-length of something like 1000 feet. The reason for this great increase in length of wave is caused by these frequencies being propagated in the Ether at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, instead of, as with sound waves, in the air, at only 1130 feet per second. We can trace these particular frequencies, called, after their discoverer, Hertzian waves, for about fifteen octaves, when we arrive at the frequency of 32,000,000,000 in a second, with a wave-length decreased to a quarter of an inch; we can render the effect of these waves visible, but have no physical organ by which we can feel these pulsations. After this, however, we get into the region of frequencies which, though still of exactly the same kind, we know and can feel as Radiant heat; these are situated in the next fourteen octaves, and bring us up to those subtle frequencies which affect another of our sense organs, and which we appreciate as light; these we have already seen have the enormous frequency of 530,000,000,000,000 pulsations per second for red light, up to 930,000,000,000,000 per second for violet, and having wave-lengths so small that it takes 40,000 and 70,000 of them respectively to cover one inch in length. There is only a little over half an octave that the eye can appreciate as light, and then all is darkness; but we can still go on further by the help of Science: beyond the violet we have the actinic or chemical rays, which are used in photography, and which enable us to trace the frequencies for a further two octaves. Beyond this we cannot pierce with our present knowledge; but there may be, and probably are, latent in our nature, senses which, properly developed, will be able to appreciate still more subtle vibrations, and organs which, perhaps, even now are being prepared for the reception of these influences.

We have no organs yet developed for receiving and appreciating what are called Wireless waves, but we have already been able to devise physical Receivers, of wonderful sensitiveness, for them and other waves of the same nature, such as those of Radiant heat. In the case of Radiant heat, the Bolometer invented by Professor Langley has been able to receive and record a change of temperature of the one millionth of a degree Centigrade, and can easily make visible the heat of a candle at a distance of one and a half miles. In wireless telegraphy also the Receiver, perfected by Marconi, is affected by rills, made by a splash of electric discharge, over 3000 miles away.

If our eyes were sensitive to these frequencies, both of which are composed, as is also light, of electro-magnetic rills, we could see anything that was happening anywhere in the world, for they go through matter as though it did not exist, as light pa.s.ses through gla.s.s; indeed, if our region of Sight waves was only put an octave lower we could not use gla.s.s in our windows, it would be too opaque, we should be obliged to have our windows made of thin slabs of carbon or other substances permeable to Radiant heat waves. Science indeed steadily points to electricity and magnetism being a form of motion, and it may be that in these invisible rays we may some day discover the nature of those mysterious forces; and, even far beyond those, as suggested in View Four, we may in the not far distant future be able to appreciate Physical Life itself as a mode of frequency.

We want, as it were, a special "Time Microscope," which I have already referred to, to examine these vibrations, and a method similar to that already mentioned in "s.p.a.ce," under Celestial Photography, by which we may traverse and examine hundreds or thousands of octaves by each second of exposure; for, although the path extends to infinity, we have already arrived at the utmost limits of our finite senses, and find that after all we can only appreciate fifty-one octaves, a few inches only, as it were, along the line of Infinite extent, reaching from the finite up to the Reality; and even so it must be borne in mind that we have only travelled in one direction, whereas the path we have taken extends in the opposite direction also to infinity. We started with sixteen vibrations in a second, as the lowest number of beats we human beings can appreciate as a musical sound; let us now descend by octaves. The octave below is eight vibrations in a second, and there are probably many animals that can only hear these as a musical sound; the next octave is four, then two, and then one vibration in a second. But we do not stop there; the octave below this is one vibration in two seconds, then in four seconds, eight seconds, sixteen seconds, and so on, until it is possible to conceive that even one frequency in a million years might be appreciated as a musical sound, or even as one of the colours of the spectrum, by a being whose time sensations were enormously extended in both directions, but still finite.

Once more we must call a halt. Our finite minds become bewildered in attempting even to glance at these infinities of time.

We measure s.p.a.ce by miles, yards, feet, and inches; we measure time by years, hours, minutes, and seconds; and by these finite units we try to fathom these two marvellous infinities. With our greatest efforts of thought we find, however, that we can get relatively no distance whatever from the HERE of s.p.a.ce and the NOW of Time. It is true that the present, as a mathematical point, appears to be hurrying and bearing us with it along the line stretching from the past to future eternity, but in reality we get no further from the one nor nearer to the other. Let us change our view and examine this subject under a different aspect.

First of all, look round a room and note the different objects to be seen. Even in a small room we do not see the objects as they really _are_ at this instant, but only as they _were_ at a certain fixed length of time ago. The present time is common to every point in s.p.a.ce and each person is in the present, but only to his own perception; to everyone else in the room, each individual is, at this moment, being seen acting in the past; those objects which are further away are being seen further behind in point of time than those that are nearer; in fact, however near we are to an object, we can never see it as it is but only as it was. We are dealing with very minute differences here, they being based upon the rate at which light travels; but they are differences which are known with a wonderful degree of accuracy.

We have here another example of how perception without knowledge leads to false concepts. When anyone views an extended landscape, he thinks that his sight shows him that the same point of Time, which he is experiencing, is common to every man, animal, plant, or material visible there, but we know now that he is seeing every part of that scene in the past compared with himself. Just as all objects therein are situated at separate distinct points of s.p.a.ce, so to our vision the objects of that scene are acting or existing in different epochs of time. An Artist gives us on a flat surface a picture of that landscape, and his representations of all objects in that scene appear therefore to us as being in the same moment of Time, but to get that effect he has to draw objects at a distance smaller than those close at hand; a fly in the foreground has to be drawn larger than a horse supposed to be in the distance, though both are on the same flat surface; they have the same parallax and are therefore the same distance from the observer, and as this produces a similar image on our retina, we accept it though we know it is only a make-believe; it serves its purpose by giving us an impression on our retina which we have learnt to interpret as representing that landscape, but such a picture would indeed be a marvel of absurdity to a being who had perfect sight, such as we have already referred to, and who could appreciate parallel rays; in such a vision there would be no perspective, no vanishing point in perception.

Now let us take a wider landscape. The Moon is 240,000 miles distant.

We do not, therefore, ever see her as she is but as she was 1-1/4 seconds ago. In the same way we see the Sun as he was eight minutes ago, and we see Jupiter as he was nearly an hour ago. Let us look still further to one of the nearest fixed stars. We at this moment only see that star as it was more than ten years ago; that star may therefore have exploded or disappeared ten long years ago, and yet we still see it shining, and shall continue to see it _there_ until the long line of light has run itself out; all around us, in fact, we see the appearance of blazing suns not as they are now but as they were thousands of years ago, and, by the aid of the telescope and of our sensitive plate, we are only now recording the light which started from cl.u.s.ters and firmaments probably millions of years ago.

Now let us take the converse of this. To anybody on the moon at this moment the earth would be seen from there not as it is, but as it was 1-1/4 seconds ago, and from the sun as it was eight minutes ago, and if we were in Jupiter, and were looking back, we should, at this particular moment, be viewing what was happening on this earth, and seeing what each of us was doing an hour ago. Now let us go in imagination to one of the nearest fixed stars, and looking back we should see what was happening ten years ago; going still further to a far-off cl.u.s.ter, the light would only just now be arriving there, which started from the earth at the time when man first appeared; or we might go to so remote a distance that the scene of the formation of the Solar System would be only now arriving there, and all the events which have taken place from that remote time to the present would, as time rolled on, reach there in exactly the same succession as they have happened on this earth; and remember that we should be looking, from that great distance, at all these past events with the same intuitional advantage as though we were actually present here in time, for however near we are to an object, we never see it as it is but only as it was in the past.

Let us but turn to any point of s.p.a.ce and we shall find at each point, according to its remoteness, the actual scenes of the past being enacted, in fact it may be said that throughout infinite s.p.a.ce every event in past eternity is now indelibly recorded.

A murder committed hundreds of years ago, in a country house, may never have been found out, the criminal and his victim have alike turned to dust, the blood has been washed from the floor, the very house and its surroundings have crumbled and disappeared, and in their place a waving corn field is all that can be seen, but at this very moment if we were at a certain point in s.p.a.ce, we should now be witnessing there, the whole actual living scene from beginning to end, as though we were present _here_ hundreds of years ago: the murderer standing over his victim, the knife driven in and the blood gushing out. If we went further away we should at this same moment be seeing the criminal just arriving and knocking at the door of that house, then going upstairs into the room, and the same terrible scene with all its minutiae would again be enacted. From a point still further removed, we should now see him, say, having lunch at a country inn some miles away, concocting his villainy, then he would be seen walking across the fields towards the house, again knocking at the door, mounting the staircase, and once more would that murderous scene be enacted before our eyes, and so on for ever; the scene, with the house and its surroundings, have indeed been completely swept away from the present _here_, but the whole tragedy will always be acting in the future _there_ in the presence of the Reality.

Let us now come, in imagination, towards the earth, from some far-off cl.u.s.ter of stars. If we traverse the distance in one year, the whole of the events from the formation of this world would appear before us, only thousands of times quicker. Make the journey in a month, a day, an hour, a second, or a moment of time, and all past events, from the grandest to the most trivial, would be acted in an infinitesimal portion of time.

When we have fully grasped this we recognise that Omniscience is synonymous with Omnipresence, and some may find, in this thought, a glimpse of that Great Book wherein are said to be registered every thought, word, and deed, which, in the direction of the Reality, has helped to nourish, or, in the direction of the shadow, has tended to starve the personality of each one of us; for we know that every word we utter, or that has been uttered from the beginning of the world, and every motion of our brain connected with thought is indelibly imprinted upon every atom of matter. If our sense of perception were greatly increased we need not go to Palestine to see on the rocks there the impressions of the image of Christ and His disciples, or of the words they uttered as they pa.s.sed by, but any stone by the wayside _here_ would show His every action and resound with every word He uttered. In fact, every particle of matter on this earth is a witness to that which has happened, every point in s.p.a.ce and every moment of time contains the history of the past in the smallest minutiae. The _Here_, embracing all s.p.a.ce, and the _Now_, embracing all time, are the only realities to the Omniscient.

Let us once more change the scene and we may grasp even more clearly that Time and s.p.a.ce are not realities but are only modes or conditions under which our material senses act. A tune may be played either a thousand times slower or a thousand times quicker, but it still remains the same tune, it contains the same sequence of notes and proportion in time, the only characteristics by which we recognise a tune. And so in the same way with our sense of sight, an event may be drawn out to a thousand times its length or acted a thousand times quicker, it is still the same scene. An insect vibrates its wings several thousands of times in a second and must be cognisant of each beat, whereas we have seen that we, with our Senses of Sight and Hearing, can only appreciate respectively at the most seven and sixteen vibrations in a second as separate beats. That insect must therefore be able to follow a flash of lightning under the conditions of a Time microscope magnifying a thousand times compared with our vision. The whole life of some of these insects extends over a few hours only, but owing to their quick unit of perception it is to them as full of detail as our life of seventy years; but to them there is no day and night, the Sun is always stationary in the Heavens, they can have no cognisance of Seasons.

I have already referred in View One to the curious results of increasing our unit of perception by a Time Microscope, and I will now carry the investigation of this subject a step further.

As conceptional knowledge is based on perceptional knowledge, and we can only perceive about six times per second, and as the princ.i.p.al forms of knowledge are gained through the eye, we are conceiving progress in phenomena under a very restricted outlook; we cannot recognise such slow motions as, for instance, the hour-hand of a watch, the growth of a tree, or rise of the tide, except by noting the change that has occurred after a long interval; there is therefore a whole world of events which we cannot see. Owing to this limit, in our unit of time perception, we also cannot perceive events which are taking place beyond a certain quickness, they become blurred and give the impression of continuity, and const.i.tute another world of events lost to us. For the same reason there is a whole world of sensation lost to us by our limited unit of sound perception; we cannot follow separate sound-events if they occur quicker than sixteen in a second, beyond that they become blurred and give the impression of continuity.

If, on the other hand, our units of perception were increased a thousandfold, as is probably the case with some insects, our conscious lives would contain a thousand more events than they do at present, and, as the consciousness of length of life is dependent upon the number of events that have been perceived, we should under these conditions have pa.s.sed on this earth a life equivalent to, say, 70,000 years under our present restricted unit; every second of that long period would have been as full of events for us as is a second in our present life of seventy years. If, on the other hand, our unit of perception were decreased a thousandfold, our length of life, based upon perception of events, would be no longer than 25-1/2 of our present days; if our life were actually reduced to that period (so as to regain our present units of perception) we should be old and grey-headed before the sun had risen for the twenty-fifth time since our birth. If our unit of perception, with our length of life, were again reduced a thousandfold, the whole of our life of seventy years would now only be equal to forty-three minutes, and, in the whole of that life, we could only see the sun move ten degrees, namely, twenty of its own diameters in the heaven; if we were born, say, at noon on midsummer's day, we could never have any idea of anything but daytime, and neither our fathers, nor grandfathers, nor great-grandfathers for fifteen generations before them could have seen the sun rise; but there would have been a tradition, handed down from a far distant past generation, that a long time ago, beyond the memory of man, there was no sun at all, everything was pitch dark, and that time was called the "Great Shadow." If their records could have gone still further back for the same length of time they would have heard that, before the "Great Shadow," the sun was always shining in the heavens, and that that great "Sun" day lasted twice as long as the great shadow.

To understand more clearly this subject of Time perception let me put another aspect before you; we are looking, say, at an insect whose wings are beating several thousand times per second, and, with our vision limited to six times per second, it would be impossible to count the number of hairs on that wing, or to see which of those hairs were split, or were bent from the straight, but, if we travelled away from that insect into s.p.a.ce at the rate of light, and were looking back, the present would then always be with us; the wing, although still vibrating at that enormous rate, would appear to be stationary, and so would every other moving thing on the earth, however quick its movement, and everything would continue in that motionless state for a million years, provided we continued our flight with the rays of light. If we travelled a little slower than light, say one minute less in a thousand years, the same scene would be presented to us, but, that which was acted upon this earth during one minute of Time, would now take a thousand years to accomplish; the swiftest railway train would appear standing still, it would take 5-3/4 days and nights to cover each inch of ground. It is thus possible to again understand how the flight of a bird or the lightning flash might be examined under conditions of time which would lead to the discovery and tracing of even the principle of life itself. But let us go one step further and increase our flight beyond the rate at which light travels: scenes would now progress in the opposite direction to that which we are accustomed to; men would get out of bed and dress themselves at night and go to bed in the morning; old men would grow young again; tall trees would grow backwards and enter the earth, embedding themselves in the seed, and the seed would rise upwards to the branch that nourished it; the blood would turn into chyle, into food in the stomach, into the piece of meat, which would be transferred from the mouth to the plate, and would then be cut on to the joint, the joint would go down to the kitchen and be uncooked, would be carried to the butcher to be cut on to the carcase, and the animal would come to life and go out into the fields. Human bodies would be formed in the ground from the dust of the Earth, pa.s.sing through what we call corruption to incorruption, the dead would be taken from their graves, brought back to their homes and put to bed; the Doctor would arrive, a miracle would happen, the patient would come to life; though this would hardly be a feather in the cap of the Doctor, as it would be seen that the medicine came out from the mouth of the patient, would be put into bottles to be thrown away, and it would be the Doctor who had to pay the Fee, and the bigger the Doctor the bigger the Fee he would have to pay. The future would in fact change places with the past, the effect would give birth to the cause as presented to our finite senses, and, though it is difficult to realise, it is indeed just as true, or untrue, that we come into this world through the grave, instead of in the way we are accustomed to, because to the Reality there is no change, the Here and the Now comprising all beginnings and ends, all causes and effects.

In this flight on the wings of light we did not in reality depart in the least from the Here, because there is no such thing as s.p.a.ce, it is all included in a mathematical point, the Here; and as the whole of time is included in the Now, the Future, however remote with all events therein, is existent in the present; the writers of books 5000 years hence are therefore writing them now, and the Human Race has read and is reading them _now_; we have always. .h.i.therto maintained that these things are only "going to happen" 5000 years hence, but in reality all events in the future are events in the same Now in which we are living at the present moment, and, as it is just as true, that time is flowing from the Future to the Present and on to the Past, as in the contrary direction (of our present outlook), so it is quite conceivable that we may some day, in the not far distant future, not only realise that the future exists already, but that we may even be able to handle and read the books written 5000 years hence, in a similar manner to that which enables us now to handle and read those which were written 5000 years ago.

VIEW EIGHT

CREATION

In our first View we saw the necessity of clearing away the weeds, the moss, and the lichen from the stem of our Real Personality before that Transcendental Self could send forth fresh buds for the advancement of _conscious_ thought to higher levels; we found that the first step towards this clearing the approach to our window, was to recognise that a knowledge of the Truth was to be gained by the use of "Introspection" rather than by Intellectualism--to realise, in fact, that it is not we, with our intellects, who are looking out upon Nature, but that it is the Absolute looking into us and ever trying to teach us divine truths concerning the "Reality of Being." We saw that the phenomena, which our senses would have us believe to be the reality or solidity of our material surroundings, are illusions created by the fact that those senses are limited in their perception to that which is conditioned in Time and s.p.a.ce, necessitating _motion_ as the basis of our perceptions, and that, when the rate of motion exceeds our units of perception, we have the impression of continuity of events, which we accept as the objective existence of matter; we also saw that the duration of Time and extension of s.p.a.ce had no existence for us apart from those senses, our very consciousness of these two non-realities depending upon "relativity"--they could, in fact, be increased or diminished indefinitely, without our knowing that any change had been made.

In our second View I attempted to take another step forward by showing how, by means of this "Introspection," it was even possible to understand that these two limitations might be eliminated from consciousness; we then realised that the whole Physical Universe is but a thin film, set up by our finite Senses, between our Consciousness and the "Reality of Being"; we saw that this could only be understood when, by the Mystical Sense, we realised that physical phenomena were but symbols or shadows of the Reality or Noumenon underlying them.

In our next View I gave an example of the use of Mystical and Symbolical thought, leading, in the fourth View, to the subject of Everlasting Life and the Efficacy of Prayer, wherein I tried to show that by examining the phenomena of Nature, as depicted on the Physical Film, it is possible to reach a point where we may even feel that we are actually listening to, or having divulged to us, the very thoughts of the Absolute. This led to the next View, where we examined the Physical Film itself, and this we a.n.a.lysed in the next two Views into those component parts, by means of which this Film presents to our senses the impression of the whole Physical Universe as an objective reality.

We have seen that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow; that the Invisible, as distinguished from the Visible, is not in a place apart from the Physical, but is the Reality of which the visible const.i.tutes the boundary lines or planes in our consciousness, as lines and planes are the visible boundaries of solids. The Kingdom of Heaven is not a locality but a _state_ of Divine "loving and knowing communion"; it is within us in the sense that we are interior and not exterior ent.i.ties of the "Reality of Being."

We have now arrived at a point where we can better realise that the Absolute cannot be localised or bounded by s.p.a.ce, and must be Omnipresent--cannot be conditioned in Time, and must therefore be Omniscient--the Here comprising all s.p.a.ce, and the Now all Time in the "Reality of Being."

With these conclusions before us I will ask you to form a new conception of Creation. All creation around us is the materialisation of the Thought of the Deity. He does not require time to think as we do--the whole of the Universe is therefore one instantaneous Thought of the Great Reality; the forming of this world and its destruction, the appearance of man, the birth and death of each one of us are absolutely at the same instant; it is only our finite minds which necessitate drawing this Thought out into a long line, and our want of knowledge and inability to grasp the whole, which force us to conceive that one event happened before or after another. In our finite way we examine and strive to understand this wondrous Thought, and at last, a Darwin, after a life spent in acc.u.mulating facts on this little isolated spot of the Universe, discovers what appears to be a law of sequence, and calls it the evolution theory; but this is probably only one of countless other modes by which the _intent_ of that Thought is working towards completion, the apparent direction of certain lines on that great tracing board of the Creator, whereon is depicted the whole plan of His work.

Let me give a simple example of Creation by a "word," which even our finite minds can grasp. When I utter the word _Cat_, it starts a practically instantaneous thought in your minds, the power of that thought being dependent upon the knowledge you have gained. If you a.n.a.lyse it you will find that, though practically instantaneous, it comprises all the sensations you have ever felt on that subject throughout your life. It commenced, perhaps, when you were only a year old, and, sitting on your mother's knee, your hand was made to stroke a kitten, and you felt it was soft and it gave you pleasure. Later on, when you were older, you had it in your arms, and you felt the first intimation of that wonderful "[Greek: storge]," which manifests itself in most children in their love for dolls; you found it delightful to cuddle and that it purred. Later on, you found that it played with a reel of cotton, and that it could scratch, make horrid noises, and countless other things, which not only make up the life of a cat, but connect it with the world around us. All these thousand and one facts are now drawn out, by a.n.a.lysis in Time and s.p.a.ce, into a long line, and are placed one in front of the other; but the thought started by the word Cat was a fair example of an instantaneous creation.