第30章

"Then he fixed me with a look like a tragic actor's.'Do you remember that talk we had in August at Chamonix--about Space? Idaresay you thought I was playing the fool.So I was in a sense, but I was feeling my way towards something which has been in my mind for ten years.Now I have got it, and you must hear about it.You may take my word that it's a pretty startling discovery.'

"I lit a pipe and told him to go ahead, warning him that I knew about as much science as the dustman.

"I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant.He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty homogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are.We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all.That is the view of civilised man.You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted.Yes, but every living thing does not take that view.

An animal, for instance.It feels a kind of quality in Space.

It can find its way over new country, because it perceives certain landmarks, not necessarily material, but perceptible, or if you like intelligible.Take an Australian savage.He has the same power, and, I believe, for the same reason.He is conscious of intelligible landmarks.'

"'You mean what people call a sense of direction,' I put in.

"'Yes, but what in Heaven's name is a sense of direction? The phrase explains nothing.However incoherent the mind of the animal or the savage may be, it is there somewhere, working on some data.I've been all through the psychological and anthropological side of the business, and after you eliminate the clues from sight and hearing and smell and half-conscious memory there remains a solid lump of the inexplicable.'

"Hollond's eye had kindled, and he sat doubled up in his chair, dominating me with a finger.

"'Here, then is a power which man is civilising himself out of.

Call it anything you like, but you must admit that it is a power.

Don't you see that it is a perception of another kind of reality that we are leaving behind us? ', Well, you know the way nature works.The wheel comes full circle, and what we think we have lost we regain in a higher form.So for a long time I have been wondering whether the civilised mind could not recreate for itself this lost gift, the gift of seeing the quality of Space.

I mean that I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences, intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.'

"I found all this very puzzling and he had to repeat it several times before I got a glimpse of what he was talking about.

"'I've wondered for a long time he went on 'but now quite suddenly, I have begun to know.' He stopped and asked me abruptly if I knew much about mathematics.

"'It's a pity,' he said,'but the main point is not technical, though I wish you could appreciate the beauty of some of my proofs.Then he began to tell me about his last six months'

work.I should have mentioned that he was a brilliant physicist besides other things.All Hollond's tastes were on the borderlands of sciences, where mathematics fades into metaphysics and physics merges in the abstrusest kind of mathematics.Well, it seems he had been working for years at the ultimate problem of matter, and especially of that rarefied matter we call aether or space.I forget what his view was-atoms or molecules or electric waves.If he ever told me I have forgotten, but I'm not certain that I ever knew.However, the point was that these ultimate constituents were dynamic and mobile, not a mere passive medium but a medium in constant movement and change.He claimed to have discovered--by ordinary inductive experiment--that the constituents of aether possessed certain functions, and moved in certain figures obedient to certain mathematical laws.Space, Igathered, was perpetually 'forming fours' in some fancy way.

"Here he left his physics and became the mathematician.Among his mathematical discoveries had been certain curves or figures or something whose behaviour involved a new dimension.Igathered that this wasn't the ordinary Fourth Dimension that people talk of, but that fourth-dimensional inwardness or involution was part of it.The explanation lay in the pile of manuscripts he left with me, but though I tried honestly Icouldn't get the hang of it.My mathematics stopped with desperate finality just as he got into his subject.

"His point was that the constituents of Space moved according to these new mathematical figures of his.They were always changing, but the principles of their change were as fixed as the law of gravitation.Therefore, if you once grasped these principles you knew the contents of the void.What do you make of that?"I said that it seemed to me a reasonable enough argument, but that it got one very little way forward."A man," I said, "might know the contents of Space and the laws of their arrangement and yet be unable to see anything more than his fellows.It is a purely academic knowledge.His mind knows it as the result of many deductions, but his senses perceive nothing."Leithen laughed."Just what I said to Hollond.He asked the opinion of my legal mind.I said I could not pronounce on his argument but that I could point out that he had established no trait d'union between the intellect which understood and the senses which perceived.It was like a blind man with immense knowledge but no eyes, and therefore no peg to hang his knowledge on and make it useful.He had not explained his savage or his cat.'Hang it, man,' I said, 'before you can appreciate the existence of your Spacial forms you have to go through elaborate experiments and deductions.You can't be doing that every minute.Therefore you don't get any nearer to the USE of the sense you say that man once possessed, though you can explain it a bit.'""What did he say?" I asked.