PROFESSOR OLIVER LODGE ON TIME.
IF one wants popular interest,—and the British Association, we may remark, needs a good deal of that article, the learned men getting as technical as if they were addressing each other only, and not a hungry, ill-informed public,—the best receipt is to get a really able man to discourse on a sub- ject which is not his own, but of which he has thought a good deal with that kind of freshness given by excursions beyond his routine province. He is sure to be much more interesting than those who stay steadily within their own province ; and if he is a really able man, he is sure not to run very wild. At the same time, he wants watching, and is not unlikely to be more suggestive and paradoxical than patient and trustworthy. Professor Oliver Lodge, a very able physicist and electrician, took the chair on Thursday week in the section of Mathe- matical and Physical Science, and soon launched into metaphysics. Yet nothing more interesting to the world at large has been said at the British Association than his address, though we venture to think that that part of it which he devoted to the subject of Time will not bear very close consideration. There were other points of his address which will. No suggestion has been recently made on 'the subject of the less usual modes in which motion is originated more likely to result in a right solution of a difficult problem than the following :—" By what means is force exerted, and what, definitely, is force ? There is here something not provided for in the orthodox scheme of physics ; modern physics is not complete, and a line of possible advance lies in this direction. Given that force can be exerted by an act of will, do we understand the mechanism by which this is done P And if there is a gap in our knowledge between the conscious idea of a motion and the liberation of muscular energy needed to accomplish it, how do we know that a body may not be moved without ordinary material contact by an act of will P We require more knowledge before we deny the possibility." Professor Lodge is a very careful and sober physicist, and we quite agree with him that it is very much to the advantage of psychology and psychical investigation, that good physicists should carry their appropriate methods of investigation into that field, and not leave it to mere psycho- logists. No portion of the recent investigations of the Society for Psychical Research has been more useful than that con- ducted by Professor Lodge ; and we greatly admire his courage in not shrinking before the conventional dread which physicists are apt to show in dealing with subjects that have been much soiled and confused by the host of im- postors who always beset any field that trenches on the land of marvel. We trust he will not be discouraged by the odium scientificum which is now much more active and voluble than the odium theologicum, and that he will steadily apply his physical conceptions to the semi-physical, semi-psychical researches into which he has recently made excursions.
At the same time, we cannot follow him in his somewhat audacious speculations on the subjective character of Time, which seem to us to contradict what we really do know, rather than to tend to its enlargement. That Time is in one sense subjective, we all know. It is not only true that what seems to one man a minute may seem to another a period of almost interminable length, but it is true that what happens in a minute at any one place could very easily be made to appear as taking up a thousand years by putting it under a very easily conceivable time-microscope of which the author of a little book called " The Stars and the Earth," published some forty or fifty years ago, gave a very clear conception. He sup- posed an eye to leave the earth with a ray of light that was just reflected from the opening of a flower-bud, and always to travel on that ray. In that case, he said, the flower-bud would always be seen in precisely the same stage of opening. But suppose the eye to travel so little slower that, say, it took a month before it fell back on the ray which left the opening bud a minute later than the ray on which it had started, then, in that case, the single minute during which the flower had been opening at the surface of the earth would be subdivided into stages which it would take a month to apprehend. And in precisely the same way, if the eye were supposed to travel a little faster than the ray of light, and to take a month in catching up the ray which left the flower a minute sooner, that minute of retrogression towards the earlier condition of the bud would be subdivided into stages taking a month to apprehend. In this way, it is very easy to see how subjective Time is, and how easily we might be employed for a period of any conceivable length in reviewing what had only occupied an instant in the happening. But Professor Lodge goes far beyond this perfectly sound conception of the subjectivity of Time, when he suggests that, after all, there may be no dis- tinction at all between present, past, and future, and that the present may be as much determined by the future as it is by the past :—" A luminous and helpful idea is that Time is but a relative mode of regarding things ; we progress through phenomena at a certain definite pace, and this subjective advance we interpret in an objective manner, as if events necessarily happened in this order and at this precise rate. But that may be only one mode of regarding them. The events may be in some sense existent always, both past and future, and it may be we who are arriving at them, not they which are happening. The analogy of a traveller in a railway-train is useful. If he could never leave the train nor alter its pace, he would probably consider the landscapes as necessarily successive, and be unable to conceive their co-existence. The analogy of a solid cut into sections is closer. We recognise the universe in sections, and each section we call the present." Now, we deny wholly that this is a " lumi- nous and helpful idea "of Time. On the contrary, it seems to us to deny that element in Time which is absolute and not subjec- tive. If Alice, after going "through the looking-glass," found " luminous and helpful" ideas of cause and effect, when she discovered that effects happened first and were followed by their causes,—the White Queen, for instance, screaming first and pricking her finger a moment later,—then, indeed, Professor Lodge's idea of Time may be a luminous and helpful one, but not otherwise. We do not think that if he had carried his accurate physical conceptions into his metaphysics, as he assured us that he intended to do, he would ever have spoken of this idea of Time as luminous and helpful. Evo- lution loses its meaning, cause loses its meaning, history loses its meaning, if "now," "before," and " after" may all be interchanged and confused. Professor Lodge says that the events may be "in some sense existent always, both past and future, and it may be we who are arriving at them, not they which are happening." But is not our " arriving " itself an event P And if events are always " in some sense existent" (we should like to know in what sense), then our arrival is always in some sense existent; we are always arriving and always at the same event ; and in that case, what does the word " arrival" mean ? No ; it is of the very essence of science that " before " and " after " really mean something, and that only in a topsy-turvy world such as Alice reached behind the looking-glass, can you put the effect before the cause without getting into such a metaphysical morass that even a physicist could not help us out of it. You may look back, or you may look forward. Your present anticipation of what is going to happen may cause or modify what actually happens. You may spend a century in contemplating and subdividing the various stages of what took only a day or an hour in its actual occurrence at the place at which it hap- pened. But you must not fail to distinguish the past, present, and future as absolutely different, and as quite irreversible in
order, unless you are prepared to abandon the scientific standing-point altogether, to sacrifice the very idea of evolu- tion, and, worse than all, to give up the whole moral basis of life. Volition, responsibility, praise, blame, remorse, conscience, —all are terms which lose their meaning if we sacrifice the idea of causation; and we do sacrifice the idea of causa- tion if we suppose that our future action may just as well have caused our present volition as our present volition may cause our future action ; and this is what we understand Professor Lodge to suggest. If I am a responsible being, my future de- pends in part upon my present resolves. But if my present 'resolves depend upon my future actions, it is a contradiction in terms to talk of my being responsible for my own future at all. On the contrary, my future is in that case responsible for .me,—whatever that may mean. The whole analogy of travelling by which Professor Lodge tries to lead us to the idea that it is we who arrive at events, not events which them- -selves happen, is a thoroughly misleading one. Of course we arrive at events, and our arrival is itself an event; but none the less untrue is it that the same events are always happening. H so, the flower is always opening, always full-blown, always dying away, always dead, always reviving ; and if that be so, what does the word "always" mean ? The subjectivity of Time has a very serious meaning, in the sense that we may spend a life in contemplating the consequences of a minute's rashness, -and that we may cast away in a minute the fruits of a life's .endeavour. But it is not true that we can confuse before and after, which must always have an eternal meaning. "In the beginning" can never mean the same as "In the end." Nor can "now" mean the same as "yesterday," nor "yesterday" the same as "to-morrow." " Behind the looking-glass" is not the right locality for a man of science.
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