Investigations of the Future

by Brian Stableford

  My editor then handed me an enormous bundle of letters, which, not knowing my address, he had been unable to forward to me. Unknown correspondents were demanding detailed information regarding the discoveries that I made and identified, and had even attached return postage—which gave me a rather nice collection of postage stamps. The first two I opened were conceived as follows:

  Brussels, 13 March 19**

  Monsieur Jean Jullien,

  Man of Letters,

  Paris

  Some time ago, I read an article signed by you in the Universal Informer regarding the Psuquet House. That article interested me greatly. I made mention of it in a paper that I recently presented to a philanthropic association. Now I have been asked to develop, next Thursday, the idea of the Psuquet House, which has been deemed most interesting. I am greatly embarrassed, for I only know about it what you have written. Perhaps you have taken your article from American works that deal with the subject?

  I would be very grateful to you, Monsieur, if you could enlighten me by indicating the source of your information, or lending me for a few hours the publication that inspired you.

  I am entirely at your disposal, Monsieur, in case I may be of some use to you; I beg you to accept my thanks in advance and to believe in my perfect consideration.

  L.C.

  Le C. par B., canton de Vaud,

  5 April 19**

  Monsieur,

  As you say very clearly, there is only the New World for eminently practical inventions able to contribute to the wellbeing of the human species. The Milner Institute appears to me to hold the record among so many philanthropic works, the creation of which we witness every day. The picture of it that you have painted has awakened a keen interest in several female persons of my acquaintance, not to mention myself. You will easily understand why, Monsieur, when you know that I have five daughters to marry.

  A slight doubt still subsists in my mind, however—can such an endeavor really exist? After you have made our mouths water, Monsieur, it is your duty to tell us the truth: is the Milner Institute a myth or a beneficial reality?

  You will, I hope, Monsieur, want to satisfy the curiosity of a vigilant mother, and accept, along my thanks for the horizons you have opened up, the expression of my distinguished sentiments.

  Madame Th. D.

  After reading these letters I was stunned. I went pale and red by turns; an uncontrollable tremor had take possession of me, and I felt that I was about to faint. My editor reached out toward the button of an electric bell in order to summon help; I stopped him.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “You merely see me consternated to have surprised the credulity of so many good people, for, I can now confess to you, there is nothing authentic in my investigation but the two letters I have just read.”

  The boss burst out laughing. “Ha ha! Did you believe that I was ever taken in by your investigation?”

  The compliments that he had addressed to me on arrival had permitted no doubts as to his sincerity, but he was a very clever individual, who never let himself be caught in a ridiculous situation.

  “I published your articles,” he concluded, “because my public prefers the implausible to the true, and, in sum, because today’s utopia is tomorrow’s verity.”

  Pierre-Simon Ballanche: Hebal’s Vision

  (1834)

  The Story

  A Scotsman67 endowed with second sight had had very poor and distressing health in his youth. Sharp and continual pain had filled the entire first part of his life. Nervous accidents of a most extraordinary kind had produced the most singular phenomena of somnambulism and catalepsy. It seemed to him that the atmosphere was the general organ of his own sensations, and that all the disturbances it experienced, he experienced himself, as if they were, in some sense, passing through the sphere of his being.

  More than once he had hallucinations that reconstituted momentarily the form and existence of people whose death was mourned, or which rendered present those whose absence was regretted. He saw and heard the heroes of all the ages, both those whose names were consecrated by history and those whose only reality was in fiction or poetry. The distant sound of a bell transported him swiftly into the midst of the most intimate scenes of life, sometimes in order for him to experience the gentle emotion of a gracious epithalamium which promised a happy destiny to young newlyweds, sometimes to make him shiver as if he had heard the funeral knell of an old man sated with days.

  Atmospheric manifestations had a thousand things to tell him about the most distant countries. All beings and objects had a voice. It was, so to speak, the soul of Creation conversing with his own soul. He believed that he had traveled, without the intermediary of his senses, in regions of pure intelligence. That solitary exaltation of all the physiological and psychological faculties, which was the object of so much study in the ancient mysteries and is so discredited in our day, had been produced in him by the extreme susceptibility of his painful organization. Nevertheless, that state, independent of the normal state, which constituted a different individuality, had the fortunate aspect that the illness only afflicted him without his being aware of it.

  Then, no longer being contained by the bonds of subordination of creatures between themselves, and the servitude of creatures to the objects of Creation, his mind wandered freely among the worlds and among the laws governing the worlds. Like Job, it dared to ask God to account for his works, and God deigned to reply to the human thought. Then it conceived notions of time and space that it could conceive only in those moments; and then, for that thought, thus enfranchised, the ideal life was real life; and then, it was not astonished by the asceticism of India that goes as far as the most complete absorption of a human being in his cause; and then, the memory of personal facts was replaced by the memory of universal facts, and moving time became immobile eternity.

  The thaumaturges who had appeared in the great epochs of transformation for the human race, the sibyls of the Romans and the druidesses of Gaul, were perhaps in contact with that mysterious chain of human destinies, all of whose rings are contained one within another. Hebal had some reason to believe in such prerogatives.

  He sometimes sensed that he was in an anterior life, which mingled with the origins of the universe, and his soul marveled at the marvels of the unfathomable work of Creation.

  Thus, he thought of himself as having a real existence in the past; he felt that he was assimilated to anterior humankind; eventually, he felt that he had become the general initiate of the mysteries , the universal man, living an infinite life, cosmogonically, mythically and historically.

  A soul escapes the hands of God. Its astonishment in the midst of the ensemble of things, when it rejoices among incorporeal intelligence; its even greater astonishment when it is imprisoned in organs; and finally, its astonishment when it is liberated from the prison of its organs: Hebal experienced these three astonishments more than once.

  His mortal life was distinct from his immortal life.

  During his mortal life he woke and he slept.

  And his mortal life, the symbol of his immortal life, marched in parallel with the life of the human species.

  And he was conscious of the analogy between his own time with the time of the human species; and his own time, like that of humankind, was divided into cosmogonic, mythic, historic and apocalyptic times.

  He went around the globe; he flew from sphere to sphere.

  Everywhere at the same time, in every place, before the phenomenal manifestation of the universe and after that manifestation, he knew that he always retained the same identity, as he knew that humankind, the human species, always retained the same identity.

  The ontological principle of human being is a cosmological principle, and that cosmological principle rests in the dogma of the fall and the rehabilitation.

  From that emerges the analogy of epochs brought together by the mind, and which, in such states of mental exaltation, seem to be brought together in time�
�which enabled him to understand that everything is contemporary for a person who can conceive the notion of eternity.

  Furthermore, so complete is the assimilation of the totality of human destinies with a single individual destiny that it renders everyone capable of reading them within themselves, by intuition in the past, and by the same intuition in the future.

  In fact, if everyone, by virtue of an intellectual faculty developed without limit, could grasp that magnetic chain of universal, continuous human destiny, would they not have at the same instant the sentiment of that entire destiny, in the past and in the future, reflected in its entirety in the indivisible lightning-flash of the present?

  Pythagoras had the instinct of a powerful assimilation such as had produced the pantheism of India, and which served to explain it. The old Italian philosophy only lacked the revelation of the ontological principle of human being, exposed in the psychological story of Moses, admirable summarized in the Genesiac history of the human species in relation to Creation.

  Human beings arrived at their final hour, who, at that moment, have a kind of concentrated impression of their entire life, will also have the sentiment of their anterior life, abysmed in infinity, of their life individualized in time and the presentiment of their future life, still in possession of the consciousness acquired by the proof of the capacity for good and evil; those human beings present an image of the intelligent faculty in contact with the general chain of human destinies.

  Hebal had found himself in that extraordinary situation several times. Perhaps it is the one that follows death, apparent to everyone. Perhaps it was given to him, before dying, to have visions similar to those that death itself gives.

  Hebal, therefore, had an idea that he dreaded not being able to express before dying: one idea, the most difficult of all human thoughts. Often, for that reason, he employed his strength of will to resist death.

  Toward the age of twenty-one, his health was restored; that state of suffering ceased, and with it that alternation of his ordinary sensations with his accidental sensations—an alternation that had previously modified all his perceptions. For several years, nothing remained to him but a nervous instability and a sensibility very easy to disturb. The notions that he had formed of time and space persisted; his meditations on collective humankind had the same consequences and the same intensity. He had retained a certain habit of isolation, which followed him even into society. He made himself a solitude in the midst of society. He was thought to be distracted when he was occupied in scaling the heights of thought or descending into the abysms of origins.

  Reading poets and philosophers transported him more easily than others along all the routes traced by the imagination and science, but more often, he marked out new ones. No hypothesis regarding the successive states of the globe, the ancient o=monuments of humankind or humans and their society, was unknown to him; and according to a series of facts of which he had a profound sentiment and a sympathetic conviction, he composed his own history of the human species, one and many, evolving and identical.

  One day, therefore, Hebal was absorbed in his vague contemplations of humans seeking humankind, of individual consciousness assimilating general consciousness—in sum, of human being in relation to the universes of sensation and intelligence. His eyes were glued to a clock on which time was measured by three hands, and he was attentively considering the relative progress of the three hands. He compared that little man-made clock to the great clock of the universe, whose phases are in irrefutable harmony, established by the eternal Geometer, lofty problems with which human science is ardent to measure itself.

  At that moment, as was his habit, he did not hesitate to apply the notions of time and space that he had formed to his own life and to universal life—in sum, to the ensemble of human destinies contained between two infinities.

  It was late summer; the dusk of evening was extending its veil of silence, of meditation, of long reverie on the subject of nature. The vision of the countryside, illuminated by the last gleam of daylight, floated before his eyes like the commencement of a dream. Indecisive and monotonous sounds came to undulate faintly on the edge of his hearing.

  At every hour, the clock played a tune that was adapted to the words of the Ave Maria, and the tune in question was very sweet.

  The little click preceding the tune was heard; the second hand precipitated itself toward the number sixteen; the hour hand was touching the ninth.

  Hebal did not go to sleep, but the interior world seemed to disappear for him; his thoughts, disengaged from everything that might constrain it or mark their flight, no longer found any limit either in time or in space. A remembrance of a new kind presented itself to his mind; it was the remembrance of all the magnetic apparitions with which the first part of his life had so often be filled. The apparitions that made a point stand out from the totality of things grouped themselves together, acquiring a unity, while classifying themselves with the rapidity cleaving a cloud. There suddenly resulted from that a magnificent ideal epic, both successive and spontaneous.

  And that epic took on a dithyrambic form. The strophe, as in primitive lyrical poetry, represented the sky of fixed things, the antistrophe the sky of mobile things, time and eternity, the finite and the infinite; the epode summarized the harmony of the two movements. Like Pythagoras, he saw a noble siren playing the lyre at the extremity of every circle of the celestial spheres, and the majestic cadence of the sphere combined with the cadence of all the others, and the seven fundamental numerical notes produced an endless concert, an eternal dance.

  Thus, all of Hebal’s visions were summarized in a single vision, and he no longer felt any desire to resist death.

  I

  Strophe

  The centuries collapsed into an indivisible instant. The great astronomical periods disappeared like the shadow of a sundial’s gnomon. The palingenetic revolutions, firstly those of the globe, then those that preceded history, and finally those that are accomplished in the presence of history and are enclosed in a chronological frame, glided like and immense and marvelous mirage. And the future succeeded the past, in order to become one with it; and dogma and myth appeared at the beginning and the end; and the first and last ages of the world died away in equally obscure horizons.

  Then Hebal understood even more clearly than someone who succeeds in conceiving of eternity. He understood even more clearly that there is no succession for God; he finally understood that the divine word gives birth to all things.

  It was thus that the great epic unfolded before his mind; but he read it as one expresses a single thought, a divine thought; he contemplated it with a sight that embraced all times, places, people and things simultaneously, for it was an epic in action, living the powerful and instantaneous life of evocation.

  Antistrophe

  Nevertheless, before the unfolding of the great epic, a light entered into Hebal’s mind; and his enlightened mind had seen and felt what no language could express, for that was the authority of things.

  A power existed: a power with no name, no symbol, and no image.

  It was absolute, unconditional existence, abstract of any form and any limit, sufficient to itself: a spectacle impossible to describe, for it was the idea considering the idea.

  And yet Hebal sensed; he sensed infinity.

  And yet Hebal saw; he saw the space in which all phenomena would be.

  And a hymn uncadenced by sound formed a harmony that hearing could not comprehend; and that hymn spoke the universe, which was one of God’s thoughts, not yet a word.

  And a light that had nothing material about it illuminated objects in the gaze of unexpressed ideas.

  And time had no astronomical periods; time was undetached from eternity.

  God had not put time into eternity, nor worlds in space.

  God rested in his immensity, in his ineffable solitude, in his faculty of containing everything before he had produced any substance.

  God was thus prior t
o all things, and all things emanated from him; and creation was potential prior to being enacted.

  Did God have any needed to radiate outside himself, to manifest himself in things and existences? Did he need to be contemplated, worshiped, loved? Did he need to make sure of his power of realization? Was he not sufficient to himself?

  Who could demand that he account for the rationale of his works?

  And who could have caused him to emerge from his rest?

  But he decided to emerge from his rest; he emerged therefrom without effort, without ceasing to contemplate himself.

  Epode

  God, before anything existed; God, then intelligent substances.

  And among these intelligent substances, some were errant, and a place was necessary in order to invest them with form—the form that would serve to regenerate them by way of proof.

  First, matter, with the plastic faculty.

  And form became the condition of existence.

  And God alone had no form.

  And Hebal saw with an intellectual sight the globes, the spheres, the beings, and the laws of the globes, of the spheres, of the beings; and it was all nothing but the divine thought.

  And he was moved by the objects that were that thought.

  And it was then that the human idea, pure of all form, distraught in the divine idea, understood the form that was not, the thought that would be speech.

  And it was then that, confounded in the divine idea, the human idea began to contemplate the work of creation in potential, and already the human idea, assimilated to the divine idea, found that everything was good.

  Hebal, therefore, before the manifestation of things and beings by creation, had seen and felt them, dormant in the thought of God, as human thoughts are in human thought before their actual expression, with the difference that actual human thought in enslaved by perishable organs, restricted by the narrow bounds of creation, condemned never to pass over the threshold of abstraction.