Читать книгу A New Era of Thought - Charles Howard Hinton - Страница 7

Table of Contents

The following pages have for their object to induce the reader to apply himself to the study, in the first place of Space, and then of Higher Space; and, therefore, I have tried by indirect means to show forth those thoughts and conceptions to which the practical work leads.

And I feel that I have a great advantage in this project, inasmuch as many of the thoughts which spring up in the mind of one who studies higher space, and many of the conceptions to which he is driven, turn out to be nothing more nor less than old truths—the property of every mind that thinks and feels—truths which are not generally associated with the scientific apprehension of the world, but which are not for that reason any the less valuable.

And for my own part I cannot do more than put them forward in a very feeble and halting manner. For I have come upon them, not in the way of feeling or direct apprehension, but as the result of a series of works undertaken purely with the desire to know—a desire which did not lift itself to the height of expecting or looking for the beautiful or the good, but which simply asked for something to know.

For I found myself—and many others I find do so also—I found myself in respect to knowledge like a man who is in the midst of plenty and yet who cannot find anything to eat. All around me were the evidences of knowledge—the arts, the sciences, interesting talk, useful inventions—and yet I myself was profited nothing at all; for somehow, amidst all this activity, I was left alone, I could get nothing which I could know.

The dialect was foreign to me—its inner meaning was hidden. If I would, imitating the utterance of my fellows, say a few words, the effort was forced, the whole result was an artificiality, and, if successful, would be but a plausible imposture.

The word “sceptical” has a certain unpleasant association attached to it, for it has been used by so many people who are absolutely certain in a particular line, and attack other people’s convictions. But to be sceptical in the real sense is a far more unpleasant state of mind to the sceptic than to any one of his companions. For to a mind that inquires into what it really does know, it is hardly possible to enunciate complete sentences, much less to put before it those complex ideas which have so large a part in true human life.

Every word we use has so wide and fugitive a meaning, and every expression touches or rather grazes fact by so very minute a point, that, if we wish to start with something which we do know, and thence proceed in a certain manner, we are forced away from the study of reality and driven to an artificial system, such as logic or mathematics, which, starting from postulates and axioms, develops a body of ideal truth which rather comes into contact with nature than is nature.

Scientific achievement is reserved for those who are content to absorb into their consciousness, by any means and by whatever way they come, the varied appearances of nature, whence and in which by reflection they find floating as it were on the sea of the unknown, certain similarities, certain resemblances and analogies, by means of which they collect together a body of possible predictions and inferences; and in nature they find correspondences which are actually verified. Hence science exists, although the conceptions in the mind cannot be said to have any real correspondence in nature.

We form a set of conceptions in the mind, and the relations between these conceptions give us relations which we find actually vibrating in the world around us. But the conceptions themselves are essentially artificial.

We have a conception of atoms; but no one supposes that atoms actually exist. We suppose a force varying inversely as the square of the distance; but no one supposes such a mysterious thing to really be in nature. And when we come to the region of descriptive science, when we come to simple observation, we do not find ourselves any better provided with a real knowledge of nature. If, for instance, we think of a plant, we picture to ourselves a certain green shape, of a more or less definite character. This green shape enables us to recognise the plant we think of, and to describe it to a certain extent. But if we inquire into our imagination of it, we find that our mental image very soon diverges from the fact. If, for instance, we cut the plant in half, we find cells and tissues of various kinds. If we examine our idea of the plant, it has merely an external and superficial resemblance to the plant itself. It is a mental drawing meeting the real plant in external appearance; but the two things, the plant and our thought of it, come as it were from different sides—they just touch each other as far as the colour and shape are concerned, but as structures and as living organisms they are as wide apart as possible.

Of course by observation and study the image of a plant which we bear in our minds may be made to resemble a plant as found in the fields more and more. But the agreement with nature lies in the multitude of points superadded on to the notion of greenness which we have at first—there is no natural starting-point where the mind meets nature, and whence they can travel hand in hand.

It almost seems as if, by sympathy and feeling, a human being was easier to know than the simplest object. To know any object, however simple, by the reason and observation requires an endless process of thought and looking, building up the first vague impression into something like in more and more respects. While, on the other hand, in dealing with human beings there is an inward sympathy and capacity for knowing which is independent of, though called into play by, the observation of the actions and outward appearance of the human being.

But for the purpose of knowing we must leave out these human relationships. They are an affair of instinct and inherited unconscious experience. The mind may some day rise to the level of these inherited apprehensions, and be able to explain them; but at present it is far more than overtasked to give an account of the simplest portions of matter, and is quite inadequate to give an account of the nature of a human being.

Asking, then, what there was which I could know, I found no point of beginning. There were plenty of ways of accumulating observations, but none in which one could go hand in hand with nature.

A child is provided in the early part of its life with a provision of food adapted for it. But it seemed that our minds are left without a natural subsistence, for on the one hand there are arid mathematics, and on the other there is observation, and in observation there is, out of the great mass of constructed mental images, but little which the mind can assimilate. To the worker at science of course this crude and omnivorous observation is everything; but if we ask for something which we can know, it is like a vast mass of indigestible material with every here and there a fibre or thread which we can assimilate.

In this perplexity I was reduced to the last condition of mental despair; and in default of finding anything which I could understand in nature, I was sufficiently humbled to learn anything which seemed to afford a capacity of being known.

And the objects which came before me for this endeavour were the simple ones which will be plentifully used in the practical part of this book. For I found that the only assertion I could make about external objects, without bringing in unknown and unintelligible relations, was this: I could say how things were arranged. If a stone lay between two others, that was a definite and intelligible fact, and seemed primary. As a stone itself, it was an unknown somewhat which one could get more and more information about the more one studied the various sciences. But granting that there were some things there which we call stones, the way they were arranged was a simple and obvious fact which could be easily expressed and easily remembered.

And so in despair of being able to obtain any other kind of mental possession in the way of knowledge, I commenced to learn arrangements, and I took as the objects to be arranged certain artificial objects of a simple shape. I built up a block of cubes, and giving each a name I learnt a mass of them.

Now I do not recommend this as a thing to be done. All I can say is that genuinely then and now it seemed and seems to be the only kind of mental possession which one can call knowledge. It is perfectly definite and certain. I could tell where each cube came and how it was related to each of the others. As to the cube itself, I was profoundly ignorant of that; but assuming that as a necessary starting-point, taking that as granted, I had a definite mass of knowledge.

But I do not wish to say that this is better than any kind of knowledge which other people may find come home to them. All I want to do is to take this humble beginning of knowledge and show how inevitably, by devotion to it, it leads to marvellous and far-distant truths, and how, by a strange path, it leads directly into the presence of some of the highest conceptions which great minds have given us.

I do not think it ought to be any objection to an inquiry, that it begins with obvious and common details. In fact I do not think that it is possible to get anything simpler, with less of hypothesis about it, and more obviously a simple taking in of facts than the study of the arrangement of a block of cubes.

Many philosophers have assumed a starting point for their thought. I want the reader to accept a very humble one and see what comes of it. If this leads us to anything, no doubt greater results will come from more ambitious beginnings.

And now I feel that I have candidly exposed myself to the criticism of the reader. If he will have the patience to go on, we will begin and build up on our foundations.