In Divine constructions the object is either design or object as we choose to regard it – and we may take at any time a cause for an effect, or the converse – so that we can never absolutely decide which is which.
So too the same symmetrical and reciprocal relationship informs matter, time, space, light and gravity. It was Paul Valéry who first associated Poe’s coherence theory of truth with Einstein’s theory of relativity. At their broadest synthesis, Poe’s Universe and Einstein’s cohere.
But Poe embraces not only physical phenomena, but life and consciousness. As everything in modern physics is stirred by deeper and deeper agitations, radiations, ‘seemingly gyrating, or vorticial movements’, as matter dissolves layer by layer to converting charges of energy, the reciprocal law of cause and effect is seen to operate even between the scientist as observer and the objects of his observation. Nothing now, not even our central nervous system or cerebral cortex, is exempt. So only now can we begin to acknowledge the total coherence, the infinite play of mirror imagery, in Poe’s design. For this absolute symmetry of the whole Universe, he claimed, inheres in the very structures of our minds. Thus his ultimate, his fundamental hypothesis: that the poetic instinct will lead undeviatingly to truth.
And, in fact, the sense of the symmetrical is an instinct which may be depended on with an almost blindfold reliance. It is the poetical essence of the Universe – of the Universe which, in the supremeness of its symmetry, is but the most sublime of poems. Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms : – thus Poetry and Truth are one. A thing is consistent in the ratio of its truth – true in the ratio of its consistency. A perfect consistency, I repeat, can be nothing but an absolute truth. We may take it for granted, then, that Man cannot long or widely err, if he suffer himself to be guided by his poetical, which I have maintained to be his truthful, in being his symmetrical, instinct.
1. (p. 207) DEDICATED TO ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT: Celebrated for his journey to Central and South America (1799–1804), that laid the foundations of physical geography and meteorology. His Kosmos began to appear in 1845 and was only now being translated into English. So it is unlikely that Poe had read even the whole of the first volume. What he had certainly seen were the reviews. By June 1848 at least nine articles – all laudatory – had been published in Britain and America.
2. (p. 212) His design is simply synœretical: ‘synaeretical’, rather: from Greek, synairesis, contraction.
3. (p. 213) the Mare Tenebrarum… well described by the Nubian geographer, Ptolemy Hephestion: A darky into the dark: the geographer is ‘Nubian’ only because he swept Poe’s mind again and again into the Sea of Shadows that once encircled the known world. Yet only here is he identified; and that turns out to be a hoax. There was no such geographer as Ptolemy Hephestion (a conflation of two of Alexander’s childhood friends and outstanding generals, Hephaestion and Ptolemy I Soter). The Arab Idrisi, or El Yrisi, was author of the Kitab Rujjar that mapped the Mare Tenebrarum. See ‘A Descent into the Maelström’, p. 358, note 3.
For overlapping material, to be republished in a wholly satiric context, see ‘Mellonta Tauta’, p. 415, introductory note.
4. (p. 213) called Aries and surnamed Tottle: The pun, though obvious enough, may have been suggested by Dickens’s ‘A Passage in the Life of Mr Watkins Tottle’ (incorporated in Sketches by Boz). Poe’s review, ‘Watkins Tottle and Other Sketches’, appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger (June 1836).
5. (p. 214) one Tuclid… and one Kant: ‘with the change merely of a C for a K’. It is the cant of Kant that Poe detests : that ‘most detestable species of cant – the cant of generality’ (Graham’s Magazine, 1842).
6. (p. 214) the advent of one Hog, surnamed ‘the Ettrick shepherd’: A punster’s joke that irrelevantly ropes in the Scot, James Hogg (1770–1835), best remembered today for The Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).
7. (p. 214) Baconian roads: Of Roger Bacon, that is, and more obviously Francis Bacon of the Novum Organum (1620).
8. (p. 215) titillating Scotch snuff of detail: Dismissing such Edinburgh worthies as David Hume, Adam Smith, James Mill.
9. (p. 216) ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’ : De nihil nihilum, in nihilum nil posse reverti – according to Diogenes Laertius, the central concept of Epicurean physics.
10. (p. 217) the cleverest ancient work on its topic, which is ‘Logic’: John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843). The ‘Miller’, in this millennial context, is possibly the Rev. William Miller, from New York State, founder of the Adventist Church (see ‘Eiros and Charmion’, p. 355, note 6). Or is it Joe Miller to join Joe Hume, of Joe Miller’s Jests: or The Wits Vade-Mecum, a favourite target of Poe’s ‘Autography’?
11. (p. 217) a truth to David Hume would very seldom be a truth to Joe : Joseph Hume, M.P., for thirty years radical leader of the House, who added ‘retrenchment’ to the party watchwords ‘peace and reform’.
12. (p. 220) Champollion… amid the phonetical hieroglyphics of Egypt: Using the Rosetta Stone, found by Napoleon’s troops near the mouth of the Nile, Jean François Champollion (1790–1832) established the key for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.
13. (p. 221) ‘I can afford to wait a century for readers…’ : Johannes Kepler in 1619, quoted by Sir David Brewster in Martyrs to Science (1846), p. 197. But the whole context of this mock-quotation, Margaret Alterton showed, derives from John Drinkwater Bethune’s rendering of that exultant speech:
Nothing holds me: I will indulge in my sacred fury; I will triumph over mankind by the honest confession, that I have stolen the golden vases of the Egyptians…
Life of Kepler (1830)
14. (p. 222) as a sonnet by Mr Solomon Seesaw: who simultaneously both ascends and descends.
15. (p. 226) This was the untenable idea of Pascal: ‘C’est une sphère dont le centre est partout, la circonférence nulle part.’ (Les Pensées, 348)
But the idea was not original with Pascal. Applied to God, the definition dates back to at least the early Middle Ages.
16. (p. 226) Baron de Bielfeld : Jacob Friedrich, Freiherr von Bielfeld (1717–1770), ‘Chancellor of All the Universities in the Dominions of his Prussian Majesty’, who dedicated his Les Premiers Traits de l’Erudition Universelle (in three volumes) to the Prince of Wales, later George IV (translated by W. Hooper, 1770, vol. 2, p. 94).
17. (p. 231) now as heat, now as magnetism, now as electricity: For Poe ‘electricity’, in some equivocal way, is identical with ‘the repulsive influence’. He was simply wrong, however. Electricity develops forces that both attract and repel. Yet his basic hypothesis – that natural forces can only originate in two ways: by electricity and by gravitation – is interesting enough. This is the modern view.
The equation for determining the resistance between two bodies as ‘the ratio of the two sums of the differences in each’ seems impenetrable nonsense.
18. (p. 233) let us adopt the more definite expressions, ‘Attraction’ and ‘Repulsion’: The Italian mathematician and astronomer, Ruggiero Giuseppe Boscovich (1711–87), an early advocate of Newton’s theories, first introduced these terms into molecular theory. His atoms were nuclei of attractive and repulsive forces.
19. (p. 234) In the famous Maskelyne, Cavendish and Bailly experiments: Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811); Henry Cavendish (1731–1810); Francis Baily (1774–1844), one of the founders of the Royal Astronomical Society, who repeated Cavendish’s pendulum experiments for determining the mean density of the earth.
20. (p. 234) Schehallien in Wales: Meaning Mt Schiehallion in Perth-shire, Scotland.
21. (p. 235) Bryant, in his very erudite ‘Mythology’: Jacob Bryant, A Mythological, Etymological, and Historical Dictionary: Extracted from the Analysis of Ancient Mythology (London, 1783).
22. (p. 236) If I propose to ascertain the influence of one mote in a sunbeam on its neighboring mote: A role elsewhere reserved for God : ‘This power of retrogradation in its absolute fulness and perfection – this faculty of
referring at all epochs, all effects to all causes – is of course the prerogative of the Deity alone – but in every variety of degree, short of the absolute perfection, is the power itself exercised by the whole host of the Angelic Intelligences.’ (‘The Power of Words’, 1845)
cf. Laplace: ‘an intelligent being who, at a given instant, knew all the forces animating nature and the relative positions of the beings in nature’, could, ‘if his intelligence were sufficiently capacious to analyse these data, include in a formula the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and those of the smallest atom. Nothing would be uncertain for him : the future as well as the past would be present to his eyes.’ (Œuvres Complètes, 1886, vol. 7)
23. (p. 236) I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path: In Einsteinian physics this reductio ad absurdum in itself becomes an argument for the finitude of the material world, and so of space. For
if space is all full of fields of force, it will follow that at every point in space there are infinite forces impinging from every side upon any piece of matter situated there; and consequently, since these forces will cancel out, none of them will act on that piece of matter at all. Determinate events happen at this or that point in space only because determinate forces are at work there; and determinate means finite.
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (1945), Part III, ch. 2, p. 153
24. (p. 239) Dr Nichol, the eloquent author of ‘The Architecture of the Heavens’; A surreptitious hit at the Rev. Dr John Pringle Nichol, Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, who also happened to be lecturing in New York in the very week of Poe’s Eureka recital. Consistently Poe distorts his quotations from Nichol’s lecture, at the same time implying that they derive from his Views of the Architecture of the Heavens in a Series of Letters to a Lady. cf. pp. 270, 296–7.
See Frederick W. Conner, ‘Poe and John Nichol: Notes on a Source of Eureka’ (in All These to Teach, ed. Robert A. Bryan, 1965, pp. 190–208).
25. (p. 241) I here declare the modus operandi of the Law of Gravity to be an exceedingly simple and perfectly explicable thing: A sensational challenge in view of Newton’s own unceasing doubts and hesitations. ‘That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter,’ he once wrote to Richard Bentley, ‘so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a. vacuum, without the mediation of anything else through which their action may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.’ (25 February 1692/3)
26. (p. 243) Now, I have elsewhere observed: It is Dupin, the detective hero of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, not Poe, who makes this observation:
But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true… In fact, the facility with which I shall arrive, or have arrived, at the solution of this mystery, is in the direct ratio of its apparent insolubility in the eyes of the police.
(1841)
27. (p. 246) Here describe the whole process as one instantaneous flash: cf. Sir Arthur Eddington: ‘In the beginning all the matter created was projected with a radial motion so as to disperse even faster than the present rate of dispersal of the galaxies…’ (The Expanding Universe, 1933, p. 80)
28. (p.251) the assumption of a principle… at an epoch when no ‘principles’, in anything, exist: Some mathematicians have shown cautious appreciation of Poe’s intuitive hits. He ‘seems to have had the mind of a mathematician,’ Sir Arthur Eddington wrote to Arthur Hobson Quinn, ‘and consequently was not to be put off with vague phrases; and made a creditable attempt to introduce precision of thought.’ (29 September 1940)
Others have been more sceptical:
Can it be science or the work of a mathematically inclined mind when that mind alone can say when laws are operative and when they are not, when forces act and when they do not, and when criticism is stifled by the arbitrary dictum that the physical principle advanced in support of an objection was not at that time valid, although half a dozen similar laws may have been invoked previously in the construction of the argument?
Clarence R. Wylie, Jr, ‘Mathematical Allusions in Poe’,
Scientific Monthly vol. 63 (1946), p. 235
29. (p. 254) It is seen, then, that the axiomatic principle itself is susseptible of variation: Poe questioned the Euclidean assumption that the axioms of geometry are self-evident truths at the very time when the Russian Lobachevsky and Hungarian Bolyai were laying the foundation of hyperbolic non-Euclidean geometry. As Poe had argued (echoing John Stuart Mill) : ‘in no case is ability or inability to conceive to be taken as a criterion of axiomatic truth’.
Yet earlier he had pressed just such an axiom for all its worth:
Now, the laws of radiation are known. They are part and parcel of the sphere. They belong to the class of indisputable geometrical properties. We say of them, ‘they are true – they are evident’. To demand why they are true, would be to demand why the axioms are true upon which their demonstration is based.
30. (p. 257) the most magnificent of theories… the Nebular Cosmogony of Laplace: Two outstanding French mathematicians, the Marquis de Laplace in collaboration with Comte Lagrange, established beyond doubt Newton’s hypothesis of gravitation. Lagrange’s chief work, Mécanique Analytique, was published in 1788. The results of Laplace’s researches were published in his Mécanique Céleste (1799–1825), translated by the American navigator Nathaniel Bow-ditch (1829–39). But it was his earlier, more popular work, Exposition du système du monde (1796), that contained a statement of the Nebular Hypothesis, attempting to give scientific form to a theory originally propounded by Swedenborg and Kant.
I ‘give Laplace’s theory in full,’ Poe wrote to Charles Fenno Hoffman, ‘with the expression of my firm conviction of its absolute truth at all points. The ground covered by the great French astronomer compares with that covered by my theory, as a bubble compares with the ocean on which it floats…’ (Fordham: 20 September 1848)
31. (p. 262) It is by far too beautiful, indeed, not to possess Truth: But this is no Grecian Urn; here beauty, for once, may not be truth. By 1900 Laplace’s Nebular Theory was rejected in favour of new hypotheses: such as Chamberlin’s and Moulton’s theory of the gravitational cross-pull exerted by a passing star, with variations such as Sir James Jeans’ Tidal Theory, formulated in 1918. Two key objections to the Nebular Hypothesis were, first, that such rings of gaseous material would tend to form a swarm of asteroids rather than condense into a single planet; and, second, that the angular momentum of the planet in rotation was too great in proportion to the sun to make the theory plausible.
Single stars or suns, it seems, are not very common; most stars cohere in binary or still more complex systems. This has led Dr E. M. Drobyshevski, of Leningrad, recently to vindicate Laplace – but with a revolutionary twist: that Jupiter was the original core of the collapsing gas cloud; that as Jupiter continued to collapse and heat, rotation condensed the dispersing gas into a ring; that this ring eventually coalesced into a star with a binary relationship to its parent, Jupiter; until the tidal exchange of gas had significantly reduced the parent’s mass for a dramatic reversal of roles; the once-dominant, or primary star, becoming a burnt out planet; the secondary star, its sun.
As gas was streaming between the two stars of this proto-solar system, the heavier elements naturally condensed into small planets with dense cores; the more volatile gas condensed into the gaseous planets outside Jupiter. That is why, according to Dr Drobyshevski, the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) revolve between the Sun and Jupiter. (Nature, 5 July 1974)
32. (p. 266) That our Moon is self-luminous: Which, of course, has proved nonsense.
33. (p. 266) On the Melville islands… traces of ultra-tropical vegetation: In the Timor Sea, 16 miles off the north-west coast of Australia. With memories of Symzonia? Or a sly d
ig at the best-selling author of the ultra-tropical Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) ?
34. (p. 268) confirmation… at the hands of the philosopher, Comte: Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42). Sir David Brewster – long familiar to Poe for his Letters on Natural Magic – had reviewed Comte’s book in the Edinburgh Review vol. 67 (1838).
35. (p. 269) the Cloud-Land of Metaphysics: Another species of Nebular hypothesis!
36. (p. 270) the great ‘nebula’ in the constellation Orion… resolved into a simple collection of stars: Modern spectroscopes, far outranging Lord Rosse, have revealed ‘innumerable’ nebulae. Sir William Hersche’s catalogue, completed by his sister in 1828, listed some 2,500. cf Thomas De Quincey, The System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescope, 1846.
Though contemporary scientists accepted Lord Rosse’s interpretation, a resolution of the Orion nebula into a collection of stars is now known to be impossible.
37. (p. 275) my reply is that : ‘These things are in the future’ (Sophocles, Antigone, 1334). See the epigraph to ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ (1841), and the title of that final squib, ‘Mellonta Tauta’ (1849).
38. (p. 278) No astronomical fallacy is more untenable… than that of the absolute illimitation of the Universe of Stars: Both the dynamic and optical objection is derived from the work of Wilhelm Olbers, the German physician and astronomer.
Lucretius had posed a naïve, yet compelling question: What would happen if you went to the edge of space and threw a spear outwards. Pascal’s definition of space – as ‘a sphere of which the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere’ (p. 226) – brilliantly evades the conundrum. But Einstein directly confronts Lucretius by standing Pascal’s definition, as it were, on its head: his universe is ‘a sphere of which the centre is nowhere, the circumference everywhere’. In this finite sphere all possible paths along which matter or radiation can travel are curved paths ‘so that they are infinite in the sense of returning infinitely upon themselves, though finite in the sense of being confined within a determinate volume which is the volume of the universe’ (R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, Part III, ch. 2, pp. 153–4).
The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin Classics) Page 48