Chapter 9

Let us take now the utmost limit of telescopic power in all directions. Where are we after all but in the centre of a sphere whose circumference is 100,000 times as far from us as one of the nearest fixed stars, a distance that light would take over a million years to traverse, and beyond whose circuit, infinity, boundless infinity, still stretches unfathomed as ever? We have made a step, indeed, but perhaps only towards acquaintance with a new order of infinitesimals. Once the distances of our Solar System seemed almost infinite quantities; compare them with the intervals between the fixed stars, and they become no quantities at all. And now when the spaces between the stars are contrasted with the gulfs of dark spaces separating firmaments, they absolutely vanish away. Can the whole firmamental creation in its turn be nothing but a corner of some mightier scheme? But let us not go on to bewilderment: we have passed from planet to planet, star to star, universe to universe, and still infinite space extends for ever beyond our grasp. We have gone as far towards the infinite as our sight, aided by the most powerful telescope, can hope to go. Is there no way then by which we can continue our journey further towards the appreciation of this infinity? A few years ago we should probably have denied that it was possible for man to go further; but quite lately a new method of observation has been developed, and we will try and use this to continue our flight.

The reason why, to our sight, an object becomes apparently smaller and smaller as it is withdrawn from the eye, until it at last disappears entirely, is that the eye is a very imperfect instrument for viewing objects at a great distance; it can only form an image of an object when that object is near enough to subtend a certain angle, or, in popular language, to show itself a certain size--the rays of light must converge--in fact, the eye cannot single out and appreciate parallel rays: could it do this, objects would not appear to grow smaller as they are removed. A pencil might be removed to the Moon, 240,000 miles away, and would still appear to the eye the same size as it does here close to you; with perfect vision there would be no such thing as perspective, but, with our present conditions of sight, the result would be inconvenient. We should never be able to see, at one and the same time, anything larger than the pupil of our eye. The beauties of the landscape would be gone, and our dearest friends would pass us unheeded and unseen; everyday life would resolve itself into a task similar to that of attempting to read our newspaper every morning by means of a powerful microscope; we should commence by getting on to a big black blotch, and, after wandering about for half an hour, we might perhaps then begin to find out that we were looking at the little letter "e," but anything like reading would be quite out of the question. We may, therefore, with our limited aperture of sight, be thankful that our eyes have the imperfection of not appreciating parallel rays. But we will now consider how this imperfection may be remedied by science.

There are two different ways of doing this--viz., first, by increasing the amount of light received, by means of telescopes of great aperture; and secondly, by employing an artificial retina a thousand times more sensitive than the human. Now, the human retina receives the impression of what it looks at in a very minute fraction of a second, provided of course that the eye is properly focussed, and no further impression will be made by keeping the eye fixed on that object; but in celestial photography, when the telescope is turned into a camera, the sensitive plate, having received the impression in the first second, may be exposed not only for many seconds, or minutes, or hours, but for an aggregate of even days by re-exposure, every second of which time details on that plate new objects, sunk so deep in the vast depths of space as to be immeasurably beyond the power of the human eye, even through telescopes hundreds of times more powerful than the largest instruments that science has enabled us to construct; and yet here is laid before us a faithful chart, by means of which we may once more continue our journey through space. A short exposure will show us firmaments and nebulae just outside the range of our greatest telescopes, and every additional second extends our vision by such vast increases of distances that the brain reels at the thought; and yet, as we have seen, exposures of these sensitive plates may be, and have been, made not only for seconds, but for thousands and even hundreds of thousands of seconds! And still there is no end, no end where the weary mind can rest and contemplate; the finite mind of man can only cry out that there is no limit. In spite of all its strivings and groping by aid of speculative philosophy, the finite cannot attain to the Infinite, nor get any nearer to where the mighty sea of time breaks in noiseless waves on the dim shore of eternity.

In this journey through space we have apparently exhausted our power of conception of the _extension_ of this View. Although we have travelled in one direction only, our flight was applicable to every possible known direction _outwards_ into the vast abyss of Infinite space. But there is another path, by which we can also travel with profit to our understanding of this subject, running in the opposite direction--namely, _inwards_. Just as the outward journey seemed to take us towards the appreciation of what our finite senses call the infinitely great, so does this other path appear to intend to infinity, in the opposite direction, leading us to appreciate what is called the infinitely small. We have already considered this direction in View One, under the heading of "Relativity," and by combining these two experiences, we may see still more clearly that our very conception of Space is one of the modes only under which motion or physical phenomena are presented to our consciousness.

VIEW SEVEN

TIME

In the last View I referred to the mysteries of Time and Space as twin-sisters; they have, as we saw, many aspects in common, and are the two modes or conditions under which all our senses act and by which our thoughts are limited. We arbitrarily divide each of these two mysteries into two parts, which parts are separated from each other, in either case, by a point which has, apparently, as its centre, our very consciousness of living. In the case of Space we call this point the HERE, and on one side of it, as we saw in our last View, we have extension towards the infinitely great, and, on the other, intension towards the infinitely small. In the case of Time we call the middle point the NOW, and on one side of this we place the duration of Time towards the future, and, on the other, we place what we call the duration of Time towards the past. In the case of Space we have the here and the _overthere_, equivalent in Time to the present and the _future_, but, though Time and Space are, as it were, twin-sisters, upon whose combined action depends our very consciousness of living, we do not treat them both equally.

It is a remarkable fact that the human race on this particular world has, in some inexplicable way, come to look upon the future as non-existent until we arrive at, and are able to perceive, with our senses, what is happening there; this is all the more inexplicable when we realise that in traversing Space we certainly have to _move_ to get anywhere, but in traversing Time we have nothing equivalent to movement. This curious way of looking upon the future as non-existent, may be another sign that our race is still in its infancy, but is more probably caused by human beings having always hitherto looked upon Time not only as a reality but as actually moving or extending along a line from past to future eternity; whereas, under our present outlook, we have no consciousness of the existence of Time except by intervals between successive thoughts; our consciousness of the very existence of Time is based upon our Physical Ego repeating the _present_, by saying to itself the words, Now--Now--Now; but there is nothing that can be called movement in this, any more than if you are standing still and saying, Here--Here--Here--relating to Space. Time is, as it were, "marking time," and as the present in time is common to all space, Time is "marking time" everywhere, and the Now therefore includes the whole of the past and the whole of future eternity everywhere. We shall get a clearer understanding of this later on; meanwhile, we are face to face with the fact that we look upon the future as non-existent.

This curious state of things is probably only accidental to the present stage of development of the human mind, and may, at any time, be rectified by perhaps either a slight rearrangement of that slender network of nerves upon which depends our faculty of thinking, or the joining together of a few microscopical filaments attached to the cells in the grey cortical layer, or even a single bridge thrown across from one convolution to another of the brain; a very slight alteration would open up to our consciousness the present existence of the future. The prime perceivable difference between our brains and those of the Apes and lower animals is the larger number of enfoldments, or convolutions, that are developed by the Human. Each new line of thought, or sequence of thoughts, requires, and is provided with, a new wrinkle or small convolution, and it probably only requires the attention of the human race to be fixed, for a time, on the consideration of this subject, to evolve the slight alteration, or bridge, necessary to enable us to see that the future, as also the past, does actually exist and is included in the Now. It may make this a little clearer to consider that if you maintain that, in traversing the duration of time, the future does not exist until you arrive there, you should also in fairness insist that, in travelling through the extension of Space, your destination, say Rome, does not exist until you get there and can see it with your senses.

As we have, in the former six Views, been gradually mounting above the mists and illusions of our everyday thoughts, and can look through our Window with, I hope, a clearer vision, I shall venture in this present View to carry the subject of the _Future_ still further, and show that, just as we have now before us and can read the papyri which were written 5000 years ago, so it is possible to conceive that books, written and being written and printed 5000 years hence, are _at present_ in existence, and that it is even possible the human race has actually already read them; whether we shall be able to see them and read them in our own lifetime may be open to question; that may again depend upon the development of special cross-circuiting of brain filaments. Meanwhile, in order to carry our present View to the utmost limit of our conception, in a manner somewhat similar to what we did for Space, I will again ask you to join me in a thought-flight towards the appreciation of this second great Mystery.

With this object in view we will first consider the human senses of sight and hearing, commencing with sound, or the vibrations which affect the tympanum of the human ear. Sound travels in air at about 1130 feet per second, and if the vibrating body, giving out the sound, oscillates sixteen times in one second, it follows that, spreading over this 1130 feet, there will be sixteen waves, giving a length of about 70 feet to each wave. This is the lowest sound that the human ear can appreciate as a musical note, and is, what may be called, the fourth Octave above one vibration in one second. When the number of vibrations in a second sinks below sixteen, the ear no longer appreciates them as a musical sound, but is able to hear them as separate vibrations or beats. The easiest way of illustrating this is by means of a revolving disc, with sixteen holes pierced at regular intervals round the edge, and a jet of high-pressure air, which is forced through each of the holes successively as they revolve. When the disc does not quite complete one revolution in a second, only fifteen puffs come to the ear in a second of time, and they are heard as puffs; but when the rate reaches one revolution in a second, the sound, as if by magic, changes into the lowest musical sound. The same result may be obtained in a more pronounced form by means of explosions or pistol shots; when these are slow and heard separately, they are painful and almost unbearable to the ear, but, as soon as their rapidity, namely, at sixteen per second, gets beyond the power of the ear to differentiate between the explosions, the impression, as if by magic, changes into a continuous or musical sound, like a thirty-foot pipe note of an organ.

To go back to our disc. The octave above this lowest musical note is obtained by doubling the rate of puffs, namely, by revolving the disc twice in one second, and the next octave by revolving four times in a second, and so on, doubling each time, until, at about the thirteenth octave, the sound has become so high that the majority of listeners cannot hear it, and fancy it must have stopped, whereas a few will still be saying: "How shrill it is!" At last, at about the fourteenth octave, when there are 20,000 beats to the second and each wave is about half an inch long, it passes beyond human audition, and, although we can show that the air is still vibrating, all is silent, the human ear being incapable of hearing so many beats in a second even as a continuous sound, though I have evidence to show that many insects can hear probably considerably beyond this limit. It is, however, possible to make these higher vibrations perceptible to our senses by means of what are called sensitive flames: we can actually, by these, measure the length of these silent waves, and as we know the rate at which they travel, we can at once compute the number which occur in a second of time, and thus ascertain their pitch. By this means we can follow for about three more octaves above the audible limit, namely, up to 160,000 pulsations per second, with a length of wave of one-twelfth of an inch.

Two and a half octaves above these numerically, _i.e._ at about the twentieth octave, we reach the frequency of Electro-Magnetic Rills, used by the Marconi System of wireless telegraphy, which pulsate at about 950,000 per second, and have a wave-length of something like 1000 feet. The reason for this great increase in length of wave is caused by these frequencies being propagated in the Ether at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, instead of, as with sound waves, in the air, at only 1130 feet per second. We can trace these particular frequencies, called, after their discoverer, Hertzian waves, for about fifteen octaves, when we arrive at the frequency of 32,000,000,000 in a second, with a wave-length decreased to a quarter of an inch; we can render the effect of these waves visible, but have no physical organ by which we can feel these pulsations. After this, however, we get into the region of frequencies which, though still of exactly the same kind, we know and can feel as Radiant heat; these are situated in the next fourteen octaves, and bring us up to those subtle frequencies which affect another of our sense organs, and which we appreciate as light; these we have already seen have the enormous frequency of 530,000,000,000,000 pulsations per second for red light, up to 930,000,000,000,000 per second for violet, and having wave-lengths so small that it takes 40,000 and 70,000 of them respectively to cover one inch in length. There is only a little over half an octave that the eye can appreciate as light, and then all is darkness; but we can still go on further by the help of Science: beyond the violet we have the actinic or chemical rays, which are used in photography, and which enable us to trace the frequencies for a further two octaves. Beyond this we cannot pierce with our present knowledge; but there may be, and probably are, latent in our nature, senses which, properly developed, will be able to appreciate still more subtle vibrations, and organs which, perhaps, even now are being prepared for the reception of these influences.

We have no organs yet developed for receiving and appreciating what are called Wireless waves, but we have already been able to devise physical Receivers, of wonderful sensitiveness, for them and other waves of the same nature, such as those of Radiant heat. In the case of Radiant heat, the Bolometer invented by Professor Langley has been able to receive and record a change of temperature of the one millionth of a degree Centigrade, and can easily make visible the heat of a candle at a distance of one and a half miles. In wireless telegraphy also the Receiver, perfected by Marconi, is affected by rills, made by a splash of electric discharge, over 3000 miles away. If our eyes were sensitive to these frequencies, both of which are composed, as is also light, of electro-magnetic rills, we could see anything that was happening anywhere in the world, for they go through matter as though it did not exist, as light passes through glass; indeed, if our region of Sight waves was only put an octave lower we could not use glass in our windows, it would be too opaque, we should be obliged to have our windows made of thin slabs of carbon or other substances permeable to Radiant heat waves. Science indeed steadily points to electricity and magnetism being a form of motion, and it may be that in these invisible rays we may some day discover the nature of those mysterious forces; and, even far beyond those, as suggested in View Four, we may in the not far distant future be able to appreciate Physical Life itself as a mode of frequency.

We want, as it were, a special "Time Microscope," which I have already referred to, to examine these vibrations, and a method similar to that already mentioned in "Space," under Celestial Photography, by which we may traverse and examine hundreds or thousands of octaves by each second of exposure; for, although the path extends to infinity, we have already arrived at the utmost limits of our finite senses, and find that after all we can only appreciate fifty-one octaves, a few inches only, as it were, along the line of Infinite extent, reaching from the finite up to the Reality; and even so it must be borne in mind that we have only travelled in one direction, whereas the path we have taken extends in the opposite direction also to infinity. We started with sixteen vibrations in a second, as the lowest number of beats we human beings can appreciate as a musical sound; let us now descend by octaves. The octave below is eight vibrations in a second, and there are probably many animals that can only hear these as a musical sound; the next octave is four, then two, and then one vibration in a second. But we do not stop there; the octave below this is one vibration in two seconds, then in four seconds, eight seconds, sixteen seconds, and so on, until it is possible to conceive that even one frequency in a million years might be appreciated as a musical sound, or even as one of the colours of the spectrum, by a being whose time sensations were enormously extended in both directions, but still finite.

Once more we must call a halt. Our finite minds become bewildered in attempting even to glance at these infinities of time.

We measure space by miles, yards, feet, and inches; we measure time by years, hours, minutes, and seconds; and by these finite units we try to fathom these two marvellous infinities. With our greatest efforts of thought we find, however, that we can get relatively no distance whatever from the HERE of Space and the NOW of Time. It is true that the present, as a mathematical point, appears to be hurrying and bearing us with it along the line stretching from the past to future eternity, but in reality we get no further from the one nor nearer to the other. Let us change our view and examine this subject under a different aspect.

First of all, look round a room and note the different objects to be seen. Even in a small room we do not see the objects as they really _are_ at this instant, but only as they _were_ at a certain fixed length of time ago. The present time is common to every point in space and each person is in the present, but only to his own perception; to everyone else in the room, each individual is, at this moment, being seen acting in the past; those objects which are further away are being seen further behind in point of time than those that are nearer; in fact, however near we are to an object, we can never see it as it is but only as it was. We are dealing with very minute differences here, they being based upon the rate at which light travels; but they are differences which are known with a wonderful degree of accuracy.

We have here another example of how perception without knowledge leads to false concepts. When anyone views an extended landscape, he thinks that his sight shows him that the same point of Time, which he is experiencing, is common to every man, animal, plant, or material visible there, but we know now that he is seeing every part of that scene in the past compared with himself. Just as all objects therein are situated at separate distinct points of space, so to our vision the objects of that scene are acting or existing in different epochs of time. An Artist gives us on a flat surface a picture of that landscape, and his representations of all objects in that scene appear therefore to us as being in the same moment of Time, but to get that effect he has to draw objects at a distance smaller than those close at hand; a fly in the foreground has to be drawn larger than a horse supposed to be in the distance, though both are on the same flat surface; they have the same parallax and are therefore the same distance from the observer, and as this produces a similar image on our retina, we accept it though we know it is only a make-believe; it serves its purpose by giving us an impression on our retina which we have learnt to interpret as representing that landscape, but such a picture would indeed be a marvel of absurdity to a being who had perfect sight, such as we have already referred to, and who could appreciate parallel rays; in such a vision there would be no perspective, no vanishing point in perception.

Now let us take a wider landscape. The Moon is 240,000 miles distant. We do not, therefore, ever see her as she is but as she was 1-1/4 seconds ago. In the same way we see the Sun as he was eight minutes ago, and we see Jupiter as he was nearly an hour ago. Let us look still further to one of the nearest fixed stars. We at this moment only see that star as it was more than ten years ago; that star may therefore have exploded or disappeared ten long years ago, and yet we still see it shining, and shall continue to see it _there_ until the long line of light has run itself out; all around us, in fact, we see the appearance of blazing suns not as they are now but as they were thousands of years ago, and, by the aid of the telescope and of our sensitive plate, we are only now recording the light which started from clusters and firmaments probably millions of years ago.