by Neil M. Gunn
“Similarly about this prevision. If I could assert, as the result of what I may call a vision, that something was going to happen to you in the future, involving factors of which I could demonstrably have no previous knowledge, and if such happening did take place, then I should be expressing a knowledge acquired otherwise than by means of my five senses. And such knowledge, whether we elected to call it second sight, clairvoyance, or any other name, would be a fact, calling, of course, for scientific investigation and, if possible, explanation. But that again, as Dean Cameron says, would require that the scientist investigating the fact, was, in fact, competent to assess it.”
“You desiderate some special kind of scientist?”
Geoffrey’s sarcasm was not lost on Colonel Brown, but he appeared to enjoy it rather than otherwise. “Well, I merely mean that a man, let us say, who is exclusively a chemist, would hardly be the right kind——”
“Hah-haw!” observed George, and amid the general merriment Colonel Brown looked blank, until, glancing at Geoffrey, he realised that he must have put his foot in it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sure I had no idea that I was intruding upon a real chemist,” and was forced to laugh himself.
“It’s all right,” said Geoffrey, smiling, but flushed a trifle.
“It’s the more absurd”, said Colonel Brown, “because obviously you and I, trained to the scientific attitude, should be in league against the metaphysicians.”
“But actually,” said the Dean, “is it not true that practically everyone is on Mr. Smith’s side? That there is an instinctive desire not to believe in second sight? That it arouses antipathy and fear? It is the unknown, and the unknown we dread. And when anyone can show that it is untrue, we are in our hearts relieved?”
By the nature of the silence that followed it would seem that this expressed a general truth.
Mr. Blair turned to Geoffrey. “How would you set about showing it was untrue?”
“Well, it seems to me simple enough,” Geoffrey replied. “Second sight, like any other illusion or delusion, is due entirely to the mechanical condition of the brain. It results from certain physiological adjustments or maladjustments. It has no more to do with time or eternity than, may I say, an eructation produced by an internal stomachic condition. I would make the suggestion that currents of nervous energy get short-circuited in a temporary derangement or muddle of the brain paths along which they usually travel, and you get a spark at the wrong place. That’s about all.
“Now consider. If you don’t accept that, where are you? If the manifestation we call second sight is not the spontaneous product of the mechanical functioning of the brain, then it must be induced by some power or animus or spirit independent of the grey matter. An arbitrary and miraculous interference by an over-soul or something like that. Once you admit that special kind of interference where are we, and, in particular, where is science? And, in any case, why do it, why call in an hypothesis based on miracle, when we know that a mechanical interpretation can explain it all? Surgeons and psycho-analysts deal successfully with deranged brains in vast quantities daily. Economy is an important word for a scientist, and he has even made a scientific law called the Economy of Hypothesis.”
Geoffrey had been speaking so forcefully that he wiped his mouth. Then he smiled and drank off his wine.
“Excellent,” said Mr. Blair, filling up Geoffrey’s glass. “To tell the real truth, that rather tallies with my own severely classical attitude. Could you also do a service to my mind on this matter of dreams? Who is the gentleman, again—Mr. Dunne?”
“As far as I have been able to gather,” said Geoffrey, “a dream is quite an irrational performance. It may be good in parts, like the curate’s egg, for those who are looking for marvels, but surely it hardly provides a basis on which to build a real scientific edifice.”
“I think you are quite brilliant to-night, Geoffrey,” said Lady Marway, with a friendly smile.
George asked if he might lead the cheers at the dispersal of the mist. There was laughter and cigarette-smoking and some more wine. Then Joyce said nonchalantly, “You have really got to get lost in the mist to appreciate decent headlights.” And was a little surprised, and secretly deeply flattered, at the reception her words got, for she had been thinking simply of her own experience. Long discussions usually bored her to tears. She now looked very animated.
The focus of attention had shifted from Geoffrey to Colonel Brown, who, before he drank, said with a smile, “I am inclined to be impressed only by evidence.”
“Ha! ha! and so we come back to where we started from. Which is doubtless”, said Mr. Blair to Marjory, “what you would expect?”
“You don’t subscribe altogether to Mr. Smith’s mechanistic theory?” the Dean asked Colonel Brown.
“I’m afraid not. In so far as it does not cover all the facts, it must be unsatisfactory. For example, I happened to mention the word serialism, and clearly Mr. Smith was not impressed, any more than he was by Mr. Dunne’s dreams, wherein it is made to appear that Mr. Dunne foresaw the happening of certain events. Now Mr. Dunne is an army man like myself, obviously an able mathematician, and his attitude is selfevidently scientific. He is not concerned about inducing mystical states. He is a frank inquirer who takes you step by step in a very practical and logical and even humorous way. Just let us look for a moment at an instance of the sort of thing he presents in his An Experiment with Time. He had a dream, involving an argument with a waiter as to whether it was halfpast four in the morning or in the afternoon. On looking at his watch in the dream he found that it had stopped at half-past four. He awoke, lit a match, hunted for his watch, found it on a chest of drawers, and discovered it was stopped at half-past four—and subsequently proved that it must have stopped just before he got out of bed, that is, at the actual moment of the dream. Thinking about this experience one morning later on in Sorrento, he wondered if it were possible for him to tell the time on his watch at that particular moment. He shut his eyes and concentrated, got into a half-doze, and presently the watch appeared in front of him, surrounded by a sort of white mist. The vision was binocular, upright, about a foot from his nose, and lit by ordinary daylight. The hour hand stood at eight o’clock. The minute hand swung between twelve and one. Dividing the arc of the swing, he decided that the time was two and a half minutes past eight. Having so decided, he opened his eyes, reached out under the mosquito curtains, got hold of his watch, pulled it in, held it up before him—and saw that the time on the watch was precisely two and a half minutes past eight.”
“That sounds marvellous,” said Lady Marway. “But what sort of relation has it to second sight?”
“Well, it would appear that he had had second sight or prevision of himself looking at his watch. The white mist was the mosquito netting outside the focus of attention. He had foreseen himself doing something before he had actually done it.”
“And how does he account for it?”
“Ah, that’s a long argument. Only he does attempt to account for it, not at all on the basis of miracle, but on a basis of mathematics and the existence of dimensions beyond the third. Now mathematics is the sort of thing that we all are prepared to pin our faith to. The absolutely pure science. Yet mathematics constantly deals with what should be to us—and are—quite fantastically imaginary things like, say, the square root of minus one. Consider, for example, such a simple thing as this: unless you can add something to less than nothing to make it equal to nothing, there would be no algebra. Do you remember the old school difficulty of trying to understand how two minuses make a plus? Mathematics also deals confidently with what are to us even more difficult to imagine, namely, dimensions beyond the third. Yet mathematics gets its marvellously valid and indisputable results.”
“I wish I could understand the fourth dimension,” said Helen.
To the smiling faces, Colonel Brown shook his head. “That is difficult. We can’t make a mental picture of the fourth dimension,
as we can of the first, second, and third dimensions. Just as we can’t make a mental picture of a minus quantity. We can only sort of hint at it. The first dimension, as you know, is a straight line, without any breadth or thickness, just a pure line. The second is a surface, having length and breadth but no thickness. The third has length, breadth, and thickness—like all of us in this room, and of course like the room itself. Our physical world is entirely three-dimensional. Now try to imagine that this white square of linen—let me unpin it and spread it on the floor—is two-dimensional only. That is, it is a surface, with no depth. Now imagine an equally flat living creature, a two-dimensional bug, let us say. This then would be its whole world, its universe. It could not conceive, could not picture, anything outside it. But I, moving in three dimensions, can bend down and lift it off its world up onto another world. This action of mine would be to it a pure miracle. But to us—we merely smile. It’s a common illustration. Do you get it at all?”
“I think I can imagine it, yes,” said Helen.
“Now if you were capable of moving in the fourth dimensional world you would be able to interfere with the third, just as I in the third interfered with the bug in the second; that is, from outside you could suddenly appear in our midst, though doors and windows are all closed. But it would be no miracle to you or to any of your fourth-dimensional friends. You would all smile at our astonishment, at our terror—gently, let us hope.”
Helen looked so thoughtful that some of the others smiled, and laughed when she said, “I thought for a moment I got a glimmer of it.”
“To finish with it,” said Colonel Brown: “you get the fourth dimension by adding to the dimensions of length, breadth, and thickness, the dimension of time. In the fourdimensional, you should be able to look along the dimension of time, just as we can look along the dimension of a straight line. If I put my finger there on the edge of the white cloth and call the spot Now, I can see not only the past part of the line extending up to my finger but the future part extending beyond it. In the same way, a person in the fourth dimensional world could not only see the past on our line of time up to Now but also the future beyond it. And I have only to lift the square of linen”—a twinkle came into his eye—“and place it over the slow curve of this arm of my chair, and we should be right bang into curved time. In short, what appears to happen in second sight is that you enter the world of four dimensions and so quite naturally see the future.”
“But does that mean that the future is rigidly determined?” Harry asked.
“That is even more difficult,” said Colonel Brown, as he blew out the match with which he had re-lit his pipe. “I cannot go into it. The mathematics of the situation, taking the serial, multi-dimensional view into account, would appear to permit of interference with foreseen events. Complete free will is as meaningless as complete determinism. Intervention in the limited sense that applies to all reality as we know it is possible to us in our dimension. I must leave it at that—or else borrow a blackboard and Mr. Dunne’s diagrams.”
“But does that mean that if I foresaw something that was about to happen, I could take steps to prevent its happening?” Harry persisted.
“It would appear that if you did your best, you might achieve a considerable degree of prevention.”
Geoffrey laughed loudly and for quite a time.
“I admit,” said Mr. Blair, “that is where I, too, get stumped.”
Colonel Brown enjoyed the mirth, even if Geoffrey’s appeared to be unduly excessive for a social occasion. He said to his host, “But we are always in the process of getting stumped. That’s the normal condition in evolution. If you had said to a scientist before Röntgen’s day that you were hoping to take a photograph in a dark room, he would have proved to you quite conclusively the impossibility of doing so—assuming he was tolerant enough not to suggest a mental home. Yet photographs are now taken in dark rooms. We can even photograph a pin inside your stomach without putting you to the trouble of taking off your clothes.”
“But that’s quite logical.”
“Yes—now that you understand the process.”
“What do you think of all this, Mr. Smith?” asked Mr. Blair.
“I think it is the modern type of fairy story. Nothing more. The sort of pretty thing that looks valid to please our primitive appetite for wonders.”
“I don’t see anything very pretty about second sight,” said Harry. “But apart from that—how do you explain the vision of the watch?”
“I should not think of attempting any explanation”, said Geoffrey, “until I had an opportunity of testing such an alleged vision under laboratory conditions.”
“But surely”, said Colonel Brown, “it is clear that you cannot produce a psychical state and lay it on a bench as you would a lump of matter?”
“Manifestly,” said Geoffrey. “You usually put it on a couch and psycho-analyse it.”
George laughed. Old Geoff was doing damned well!
“Is it not possible that we are confusing two quite different things,” said the Dean, “as different as physics and psychology? The one deals with matter; the other with mind. Each functions in its own way and has its own quite different conceptions and laws. Our appreciation of colour, of sound, of all sensory things, not to mention abstract things like love and hate, is not the concern of physics. For these things we have a separate science which we call psychology. There is a certain interrelation, inasmuch as the material body is an instrument for expressing psychical qualities. But no physicist could ever deduce from my grey matter my conception of beauty or horror or joy or pain. Yet these are precisely the qualities that are very important to me, to all mankind—and would be even if we were incapable of appreciating anything beyond sensual reactions. To us they are life and hope; they are being. Very well, that being so, they are to us the most important facts in the everyday process of living. Now let us test that by taking the extreme case; let me say, even for the purpose of discussion, that I am a mystic, that I believe in what is called mysticism. I am probably right in thinking that at once Mr. Smith gives me up in despair. Am I right?”
“Well——” said Geoffrey, smiling awkwardly.
“I understand. You would rather not appear to be rude, and if you spoke your mind straightforwardly you might sound very rude indeed!”
The gentle humour was appreciated and Geoffrey laughed.
“Yet consider,” said the Dean. “Your mystic is no more an abnormal person than is a great scientist, or a great artist. Like them, he is a person who has gone through a long and difficult training in an effort to achieve certain results. He is a man who has taken the trouble to investigate by personal experience certain psychic processes, and he can tell you, so far as language can communicate to you his meaning, the nature of the results he has achieved.”
“And what when his language fails, which seems to be the difficulty?” asked Geoffrey.
“Well, he can’t help that. I see you shrug, but think. Assuming you had to explain to a man who was born blind the redness of the port in your glass, could you do it? Could you get him to apprehend redness as you and I apprehend it?”
Geoffrey was forced to admit that he could not.
“Similarly, if you cannot understand the state of mind the mystic attempts to describe to you, the fault may not lie altogether with the mystic. Now just as the scientist goes on making discoveries about matter, so the mystic goes on making discoveries about the powers of the mind, until he is able to do things with it comparable to what the taking of photographs in a dark room was to pre-Röntgen man. I gather that you are not impressed by Yoga. But what Yogis have achieved in the way of control over the body alone appears to us to be miraculous. Sight, hearing, and smell are enhanced to a degree that to us is incredible. The Yogi can endure extremes of heat and cold. He can sit naked in a snowstorm for days without food and be none the worse. We are astonished at a man seeing a watch-face that is placed outside his visual range, with his eyes shut. But
such a thing was a commonplace to certain Indian thinkers, who could see and hear without the use of their senses at all. It is said of some Yogis that they could make their bodies invisible and even pass through doors. Perhaps they had achieved Colonel Brown’s fourth-dimensional state! However, I am not going to debate these physical marvels. What I am concerned about is the states of mind that can be achieved by their difficult and exacting processes of concentration. For example, through concentration on what he calls the three-fold modifications which all objects constantly undergo, the Yogi assures us we can acquire the power to know the past, the present, and the future. He knows when he is going to die. Automatically you at once become not merely sceptical but full of active disbelief. You have the feeling that if you were allowed to test these Yogis in your laboratory you would very soon expose them. But that is merely a feeling on your part, a revolt of your mind, automatic and extremely strong, against what you don’t want to believe. But that does not dispose of centuries of strenuous development of the mind, of a kind and to a degree new to us and therefore charged with fear of its powers over what to us is the unknown. These powers have yet to be investigated by our psychologists. Such investigation may take a long time, because our psychologists are not sufficiently advanced in psychic experience to assess the evidence. However, this is what I am coming to, and here I am capable of checking results through my own experience—checking them, that is, to a small tentative degree.”