Science and the Infinite Part 5

One other example of an instantaneous thought. Let us suppose a large room fitted with, say, a hundred thousand volumes, comprising all the knowledge gained by every Specialist in every Science concerning the plan of Creation. In our finite minds, under the limits of Time and s.p.a.ce, the word representing the contents of that library would start, when uttered, an instantaneous thought a.n.a.logous to that of our last example, according to the knowledge that each individual had already acquired of the contents of those books; but this knowledge had only been gained by taking down each volume separately and reading one book at a time, beginning at the beginning and taking each page and each word in succession, and a lifetime would not suffice to enable us to read them all; whereas, if our knowledge were _complete_, the word representing the contents of that room would start an instantaneous thought, comprising not only every book, but every chapter, page, word, letter, and punctuation contained in that library, or in one which comprised all knowledge from the beginning to the end of Time.

It is a well-known fact that at the approach of death, when the perceptive senses are completely, or almost completely, in abeyance, as in the "self-forgetting" referred to in "The Vision," the duration of Time appears to have no reality; in numerous cases of drowning, where the person has been no more than one or two minutes under water, the whole of a long life, with every forgotten trivial occurrence and the mult.i.tude of thoughts attached thereto, have been brought vividly before the mind, as it were, instantaneously; those also who have been put under nitrous-oxide gas, though the life of the body is not affected, know how, with departure of sense perception, the sense of Time is completely annihilated. I have myself experimented under such conditions, and attempted to realise the duration of time by counting steadily, one, two, three, four, &c., and had no knowledge whatever that between, say, "four" and "five" there was a complete hiatus of several minutes when, for me, time had vanished; I was still counting steadily when the anaesthetic had pa.s.sed away, and it was quite impossible to realise that such time had elapsed, as I had not reached more than the twelfth count, whereas, according to the time expired, I should have reached the fiftieth or sixtieth. A number of examples of what may be called instantaneous thoughts created in the mind of a sleeper have been collected, and many of us have had similar experiences. I give one as an example: "Maury was ill in bed and dreamed of the French Revolution. b.l.o.o.d.y scenes pa.s.sed before him. He held long conversations with Robespierre, Marat, and other monsters of that time, was dragged before the tribunal, was condemned to death, and carried through a great crowd of people, bound to a plank. The guillotine severed his head from his shoulders. He woke with terror to find that a rail over the bed had got unfastened and had fallen upon his neck like a guillotine, and, as his mother who was sitting by him declared, at that very moment."

In the above case the whole scene was started instantaneously in his brain, but in waking his mind a.n.a.lysed it in Time and s.p.a.ce and spread it out into a long historical record. The opposite process to this, namely, the building up a thought-picture, is what we do every day when we form and combine our conceptions under the dominion of Time and s.p.a.ce, until we have acc.u.mulated in our minds a mult.i.tude of concepts which form as it were a single subject, somewhat a.n.a.logous to a painter when he has completed his picture, a writer his book, an architect his house, or even a mechanic his machine. An interesting example of a musician constructing a thought-picture is given by Mozart himself:

"When I am all right and in good spirits, either in a carriage or walking, and at night when I cannot sleep, thoughts come streaming in and at their best. Whence and how I know not, I cannot make out. The things which occur to me I keep in my head, and hum them also to myself--at least others have told me so. If I stick to it, there soon come, one after another, useful crumbs for the pie, according to counterpoint, harmony of the different instruments, &c. This now inflames my soul, that is if I am not disturbed. Then it keeps on growing, and I keep on expanding it more distinctly, and the thing, however long it be, becomes indeed almost finished in my head, so that I can always survey it in spirit like a beautiful picture or a fine person, and also hear in imagination, not indeed successively, as by and by it must come out, but all together. That is a delight! All the invention and construction go on in me as in a fine strong dream, but the overhearing it all at once is still the best."

With these ill.u.s.trations before us may we not carry the a.n.a.logy even further, and see that, as our conception of a Cat was made up of numberless small acquisitions of knowledge, some of which had to be discarded, or eliminated as errors, from our minds as our knowledge grew, and as each true fact became confirmed and impressed upon our brain it made itself a _permanent_ record and became a centre to be used for gaining further knowledge; so in this wonderful Thought of the Great Reality, whose mind may be said to be omnipresent, each individual soul is a working unit in the plan of Creation; each unit as it gains a knowledge of the Will of the Deity forms for itself a _personality_ helping forward the work towards its fulfilment; without that knowledge there can be no personality, no unit in the great completed thought, no life hereafter.

The True Life is fulfilled by him who has progressed so far in the knowledge of the Divine as to realise that he is the offspring of the Absolute, and therefore stands face to face with his Transcendental Personality, his [Greek: Christos], of which the Physical Ego is only the outline or boundary form visible in the physical universe. Each individual has free will to define his own boundaries, his own limitations; he builds up the walls of the house in which he lives, and he has power to brick up or open out the windows through which he may see the Truth; happy are those whose windows are open, but many, alas, choose to make the wall opaque by confining their attention to the physical shadows, or by strangling their spiritual intuition and preventing all advance in thought by blind subservience to obsolete dogmas.

We are instruments of Divine purpose in the scheme of Creation. Each individual Physical Ego seems to be a Micro-Cosmos, imaging the Universe, the Macro-Cosmos. As the phagocytes, the policemen of the blood, flock to a breach in the human body to overcome any invasion of the enemy, whether poisons or bacteria, which would otherwise detract from that progress of cell formation upon which the scheme of human life depends, so do the true lovers of the Divine meet, by active resistance, any attempt of the enemies of the Good, Beautiful and True to r.e.t.a.r.d the advancement of the scheme of Creation to its ultimate goal of perfection. The human body is composed of innumerable cells and several special colonies of cells, which we call organs, each of which has its special work to do, and secretes and discharges special fluids necessary for the welfare of the whole body. All of these cells are alive, and myriads of them are moving on their own account, apparently quite independent of, and in complete ignorance of, the feeling and perception of the whole body; they are, however, microscopical units of that body, and its welfare depends upon their contribution of work; it is, in fact, only through their ceaseless activities that the life in that body is maintained--a phenomenon a.n.a.logous to that described in the simile of a Forest Tree in View Four. So are we integral parts of the scheme of Creation, and each act, either in accordance with the Divine purpose or the reverse, is helping forward or r.e.t.a.r.ding the completion of that Thought, though like the cells we are ignorant of the end which Creation has in view.

In this life we seem indeed to be only, as it were, in embryo! The study of embryology has lately shown us clearly how the clothing of our Physical Ego has been formed, during the past millions of years, from the lowest forms of life. Each one of us has, during what may be called his lifetime, gone through all the different stages of evolutionary development which, since the beginning of life on this planet, have been employed to build up the human body in its present form. Embryology has shown us that, during gestation, each human embryo is a _replica_ of the past; it pa.s.ses through the different Imago stages from protoplasm to man, being unrecognisable at certain stages from a monad, an amoeba, a fish with gills, a lizard, and a monkey with a tail and dense clothing of hair over the whole body. The human embryo has also, at an early stage, the thirteenth pair of ribs, which is found in lower animals and is still seen in a rudimentary form in anthropoid apes, but which disappears from the human embryo before birth. Each generation, under evolutionary development, will witness a further advancement in the clothing of the Physical Ego, until it may be conceived that a hundred thousand years hence our present stage of development will be seen only as one of the stages through which the embryo has to pa.s.s before birth at that distant time. May we not even glimpse at the future to which evolution is carrying us? For in any of these stages we see organs forming whose use only comes into play long after that stage has been pa.s.sed; so also, in the new rudimentary forms of thought which are started by every fresh discovery may we not some day be able to descry the heights which we are destined to attain if we earnestly seek after Truth?

Radio-Activity has shown us that all forms of matter are but different combinations of one primal brick; by synthesis thousands of new forms of matter, unknown in Nature, are actually now being built up in our laboratories, and the number of such combinations cannot conceivably be limited; so do we also see that all the known forms of energy in nature are interchangeable, one with another, with exactly known equivalents and ratios, pointing to their being only different combinations of one unit of energy. If such is the case, it would seem to follow that there are countless other forces of which we at present have no cognisance, but which may at any time come within our field of investigation.

In our life here we are steadily progressing from the lower to the higher form of being, from the purely Physical towards the Transcendental, each generation starting from a higher level; the boundary line between the Physical and Transcendental is being continually advanced towards the latter, and it may well be, as I have already suggested in View IV, that we are even now on the eve of discovering a new force, or aspect of Creation, which will open a wider view and give us a clearer knowledge of the goal which we are destined to reach hereafter.

Each generation will, according to the teaching of Embryology, gradually come into the world at a higher stage of development than its predecessors, until the last Physical Ego, at its birth, will coincide with the final stage of development, when there will be no more physical clothing, the disintegration of Matter being completed, and, it can be pictured that at the final consummation, there will be nothing imperfect, no shadow left, that all will be spiritual. The object of Creation would therefore appear to be the population of the Real Universe with spiritual ent.i.ties, until the whole Spiritual Universe will be taken up by Transcendental Personalities, which will be one with the Reality, and the Great Thought completed.

Once more let us recognise that we are dependent for knowledge of surroundings upon our perception of movements, and that as our conceptional knowledge is based on perceptional knowledge, our thoughts are limited by Time and s.p.a.ce and can only deal with finite subjects. From this arises all our difficulty of understanding the Infinite; we cannot under our present conditions know the whole Truth; if we could do that we should be able, as it were, to look all round the subject, and Infinity would then be seen to be a pseudo-conception of our finite thoughts. We can only think of one finite subject at a time, and, at that moment, all other subjects are cancelled; we can, in fact, only think in sequences, and, taking the particular Infinities of duration and extension which we have been examining, we can only think of points in Time and s.p.a.ce as existing beyond or before other fixed points, which again must be followed by other points. We cannot fix a point in Time or s.p.a.ce so as to exclude the thought of a point beyond; the idea of an Infinite is therefore a necessary result of the limitation of our thoughts. The whole Truth is there before us, but we can only examine it in a form of finite sequences. A book contains a complete story, but we can only know that story by taking each word in succession and insisting that one word comes in front of another, and yet the story is lying before us complete. So with Creation; we are forced to look upon it as a long line going back to past eternity, and another long line going on to future eternity, and, with our limitations, we can only think of all events therein as happening in sequence; but eliminate Time and we become Omniscient, the whole of Creation would be before us as an Instantaneous Thought of G.o.d.

Accordingly under the dominion of Time we appear to be in a similar position to that of a being whose senses are limited to one-dimensional s.p.a.ce--namely, to a line; we can only have cognisance of what is in front and behind, we have no knowledge of what is to the right or left, we appear to be limited to looking lengthwise in Time, whereas an Omniscient and Omnipresent Being looks at Time crosswise and sees it as a whole. A small light, when at rest, appears as a point of light, but when we apply quick motion, the product of Time and s.p.a.ce, to it, we get the appearance of a line of light, and this continuous line, formed by motion of a point, is, I think, a.n.a.logous to the Physical Universe appearing to our finite senses as continuous in Time duration and s.p.a.ce extension, though really comprised in the Now and the Here, the whole of Creation being therefore an Instantaneous Thought.

A consideration of our limitation in s.p.a.ce may also be useful to show how impossible it is for us to hope to see by our senses the Reality or by our thoughts to know the Spiritual. Our senses and thoughts are limited to a s.p.a.ce of three dimensions, and we can therefore only see or know that part of the Absolute which is or can be represented to us in three dimensions; a being whose senses were limited to a Universe of one dimension--namely, a _line_, could have no real knowledge of another being who was in a Universe of two dimensions--namely, a _flat surface_, except so far as the two-dimensional being could be represented within his line of sensation; so also the two-dimensional being, on a _plane_, could have no true knowledge of a being like ourselves in a Universe of three dimensions. To his thoughts, limited within two dimensions, a being like ourselves would be unthinkable, except so far as our nature could be made manifest on his plane; so can it be seen that we, limited by our finite senses to Time and s.p.a.ce, and our consciousness dependent upon that limited basis of thought, can only know that aspect of the Reality which can be manifested within that range of thought--namely, as Motion, or what we call physical phenomena.

Let me attempt just one more view before we part, which may make this conception of Creation, as an Instantaneous Thought, even clearer to our finite senses. Imagine a Spectator endowed with the same sense of vision that we have--namely, limited to six units of perception per second, but able to look on, as it were, from outside the Universe, without himself being affected by any alteration that takes place in what may be called the flow of time. Consider some of the changes he would witness if Time were gradually eliminated from phenomena. The inhabitants, who at first were seen walking by slow, successive steps, would soon be seen gliding from place to place, the movement of their legs having pa.s.sed beyond the sense of vision; the next stage would see the inhabitants unrecognisable as human beings when walking, although they would still be visible if they stood still, they would be moving too fast for sight, they would be seen only as lines or bands extended between their points of departure and destination; then day and night would be following each other so quickly that soon the day would only be a flicker of light, till, when the week became equal to one second of the Spectator's time, day and night would disappear as separate phenomena; then the week, the month, and the year would in turn flicker, solidify, or become continuous, and disappear with all the mult.i.tudinous events contained therein; human life would then be affected, would flicker, and follow the same course; to the Spectator the birth of each individual would become coincident with his death, and Nations would be seen to rise and progress towards their destination without any evidence of individual existence; the Human Race itself would next succ.u.mb, then the whole of planetary life, then the formation and destruction of Solar Systems, then the gathering together and dissemination of firmaments, and, finally, the beginning and end of the very Universe would coincide. Motion, or Physical phenomena, and therefore Matter, would vanish, and the Great instantaneous Thought be complete. We seem to have been able to glimpse from our Watch Tower, though through a gla.s.s darkly, the whole Truth, and to see that the Infinity of Time is a figment of our finite senses and is comprised in the Now. The same treatment, followed by the same result, may be applied to the Infinity of s.p.a.ce, and we again see that all s.p.a.ce is comprised in the Here; it is only by the conditions of our existence in this physical universe, _insisting_ on our a.n.a.lysing everything in Time and s.p.a.ce that Motion or Change become the very basis of our Consciousness.

We have seen that the Idea of Infinity is a necessary result of our finite senses, that the only Reality is the Spiritual, the Here and the Now; that the Riddle of the Universe is not to be solved by the _Intellect_ but by that method which is employed by those who are earnestly following the "Quest of the Grail"--namely, by realising that our True Personality or Transcendental Ego is an emanation from the Absolute; that we are one-with Him, and that it is by following the old h.e.l.lenic command "[Greek: Gnothi seauton]" (Know thyself)--namely, by _Introspection_, that we can hope to attain to the understanding of what is the Reality of Being.

FINIS