"Tongue of Speech of the Unspoken"
As a reporter of the Unseen, M. Maeterlinck brings a fine French clarity of expression to an imagination and a sensibility possessed by few other men. It is no exaggeration to say of this book that it does for the Fourth Dimension what Fabre has done for the insect world. Here are Space and Time made as plain as such aggravating but fascinating, bstractions can be made to those who cannot explore with Einstein the perihelion of Mercury.
" When we have said that we do not know exactly what the Fourth Dimension is, we have said all that we can really know about it. The rest is hypothesis, speculation, Presentiment, approximation—all more or less rash. But such adventures are useful Soundings into the undoubted- unknown -that we shall one ask- apprehend. All our science has been founded by the aid of such soundings." Thus M. Maeterlinck, but the ' question at once arises, - Does the Fourth Dirriension really exist ? We May safely and sanely assume that'it does, that there is a " many-splendoured thing " which our numbed conceiving of to-day will come to grips with in the future, seeing it face to face, as friend to friend.. M. Poincare has said so, among a host of other equally learned mathematicians who are not prone to exaggerated statements. It exists, but eludes us :—
"Past the plunge of plummet, In seas we cannot sound."
We cannot reach the heights and depths of Time, not because they do not exist, but only because they are beyond the lengthof our cable-tow.- Three rdimensiOns we know, or _rather, think we know, for they also are illusions, demanding a point in space from whiph to measure them, and where in space, Which is without beginning or end, may we find that point ? At the conclusion of our thought there is no constant, nothing to grasp at in the river of Time but the flotsam of faith drifting down Iroin the forests of Deity. To know the -measures of our world, then, we must somehow know God, the Unknowable. Yet, if we had another sense or simply: perhaps a heightened ocular function, other ittributii and co-ordinations of Space and Time might be revealed to us, particularly a fourth extension in a direction different from the three which we believe we understand.
M. Maeterlinck, with consummate skill, illumines these dark thoughts with examples drawn from all kinds of simple sources. As good as any in the book is a story told to this reviewer by a very eminent philosopher. Let us imagine, then, a beetle whose Universe is bounded by a rectangular sheet of paper, and let us suppose, further (what is by no means proved), that the beetle has a two-dimensional brain, knowing only length and breadth. Now, this beetle is a particularly learned creature. It measures one diagonal of its Universe and all its four angles, proving by beetle Euclid that the other diagonal must be exactly the same length as the one it has measured. It then sets out to pace this other diagonal and finds to its amazement that it is one inch longer. At first it begins to doubt its Universe. - But by a super- intellectual effort it conceives a third dimension, a curvature in Space which its senses .4::annot register, but which its soaring mind may faintly conceive. This bump, of course, is merely a piece of pencil lying across one diagonal, Over which the beetle lids "climbed without the registration of its two- dimensional senses. Now, the Fourth Dimension must be some similar object athwart our threedimensional measurements of the human Universe.
To consider another aspect -of the same concept. As the line joins two.or. more separtitepoints into one whole, and as
a plane surface joins set era! into a whole (a quadrilateral or triangle), and as a solictioinS-sevenil surfacesinto a whole (the cube or pyramid), so also the Dimension may be the stuff or what not (the name - does not matter) joining a group of solids in some method that our poor little minds boggle at through-the dark glass-cif a million yeari of thinking. In another million—or only in another generation : who can tell ?--we shall see this secret of space. Again, as Time is the distance which separateis events in any given order of succession, we may consider it as the FoUrth Dimension betcituse it is not-a diatanCe contained iri our ordinary three- dritti-' ens ional concepts. It is" a distance, but a distance outside space as we know it. Ai Ouspensky says, " trY the
we express a certain space and~ a movement within this space, consequently extension in time is extension 'in unknown space, namely, the Fourth Dimension.!'
The world is not confined to messages we can receive by our senses—as well might we suppose there were no scents but those we smell, or music but what we hear. In mathe- !,niatics and geometry we soon touch the borderlands of an -earth that is very different from ours. Of what use, it may be asked, are inquiries ? They yield no tangible result, but they are not idle, because they serve to give us a foretaste Of the coming transfiguration of man, when these things shall be revealed. We an prepare our brains to receive the new knowledge. For the rest," if we knew exactly how the Fourth Dimension would affect our practical life, we
would be breathing under other skies." _ . Since the beginning of the world the Fourth Dimension has been waiting for us ; now the glimmer of its light is on our mental horizon. Already, Dr. Whitehead tells us, certain astronomical calculations can only be resolved thanks to the time-space continuum: More exciting, because more com- prehensible to the average Man, is the fact that Time, whatever the truth about it may be, is certainly an illusion of the senses as it comes to us, forit varies with the distance from any given event. Often the associated phenomena are split Up in these swift days. When Lieutenant Kinkead dashed to. his death, for instance, the observers heard the roar of his engines after he had disappeared beneath the Solent. And similarly an observer with a telescope would have seen King Charles's head drop from the block a little later than the " reality " of the event as experienced by the executioner, who himself knew of the deed an infinitesimal fraction of time after the King himself. And in some other world with some other telescope, -King Charles's head may be—indeed, must be—falling now. The old triumphant claim that there is no time and no death is true. History is a pageant in which we are immortal actors. Our words echo from star to star. There is nothing but the undefeated present.
The meaning of dreams is closely related to our conception of Time. In the plurality of times which we have seen to be human conventions, past, present and future are confounded and therefore a dream may be (and often is) not a memory of things past, but a herald of the future. There is no spaco here to pursue the subject, but the author's chapter on dreams will certainly be one of the most popular sections of a wholly delightful book.
There is only the Om Tat Sat, the " I am That " of the Aryans : " that which is regarded as Incomprehensible by those who know Him best, and as Known by those who know nothing of Him." With this quotation from , the Sama Veda, Mr. Maeterlinck ends his beautiful betrothal of mysti- cism to mathematics. But the best summing up of the whole matter is that of Professor Eddington, which I have translated roughly from the French of M. Maeterlinck : " At the brink of the Unknown we have found a strange footmark. About it we have raised a scaffolding of learned theories in an endeavour to ascertain its origin. At last we have succeeded in reconstituting the creature which left this impress and we find it is nothing but the print of our own foot."
F. Y-B.
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