The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

18 Scientific Mythology and Popularization

Reference has already been made to ‘survivals’ left behind in the common mentality by theories no longer believed in by the scientists, whereby those theories are enabled to continue as before to exercise their influence over the general outlook of mankind, and it will be useful to give some further attention to the subject, for it is one that can contribute toward the explanation of certain aspects of the present period. In this connection it should first be recalled that when profane science leaves the domain of a mere observation of facts, and tries to get something out of the indefinite accumulation of separate details that is its sole immediate result, it retains as one of its chief characteristics the more or less laborious construction of purely hypothetical theories. These theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, since their starting-point is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory, and as was said earlier, their greater or lesser multiplicity has no bearing on the question; and besides, such hypotheses are really not inspired by the results of experience to nearly the same extent as by certain preconceived ideas and by some of the predominant tendencies of the modern mentality. The ever-growing rapidity with which such hypotheses are abandoned in these days and replaced by others is well known, and these continual changes are enough to make all too obvious the lack of solidity of the hypotheses and the impossibility of recognizing in them any value so far as real knowledge is concerned; they are also assuming more and more, in the eyes of their authors themselves, a conventional character, and so a quality of unreality, and this again may be noted as a symptom of the approach toward final dissolution. Indeed the scientists, and particularly the physicists, can hardly be completely deceived by constructions of this sort, the fragility of which they know all too well, today more so than ever. Not only are they quickly ‘worn-out’, but from their beginnings the very people who build them up only believe in them to a certain doubtless rather limited extent, and in a more or less ‘provisional’ way; very often they even seem to regard them less as real attempts at explanation than as mere ‘representations’ and as ‘manners of speaking’. This indeed is really all they are, and we have seen that Leibnitz had already shown that Cartesian mechanism could be nothing but a ‘representation’ of outward appearances, denuded of all genuinely explanatory value. Under such conditions the least that can be said is that the whole business is rather pointless, and a conception of science that can lead to a labour of that kind is certainly a strange one; but the danger of these illusory theories lies in the influence they are liable to exercise on the ‘public at large’ by virtue of the fact that they call themselves ‘scientific’, for the public takes them quite seriously and blindly accepts them as ‘dogmas’, and that not merely for as long as they last (that time often being not long enough for them to have even come fully to the knowledge of the public) but more especially when the scientists have already abandoned them, and for a long time afterward as well. This happens because they persist, as was pointed out earlier, in elementary teaching and in works of ‘popularization’, in which they are always presented in a ‘simplified’ and resolutely assertive form, and not by any means as mere hypotheses, though that is all they ever were for those who elaborated them. The use of the word ‘dogma’ a moment ago was deliberate, for it is a question of something that, in accordance with the anti-traditional modern spirit, must oppose and be substituted for religious dogmas; an example like that of the ‘evolutionary’ theories, among others, can leave no doubt on that score; and it is even more significant that most of the ‘popularizers’ have the habit of sprinkling their writings with more or less violent declamations against all traditional ideas, which shows only too clearly the part they are charged with playing, albeit unconsciously in many cases, in the intellectual subversion of our times.

Thus it comes about that there has grown up in the scientistic ‘mentality’ — which is, for the largely utilitarian reasons already indicated, more or less the mentality of a great majority of our contemporaries — a real ‘mythology’: most certainly not in the original and transcendent meaning applicable to the traditional ‘myths’, but merely in the ‘pejorative’ meaning that the word has acquired in current speech. Endless examples could be cited: one of the most striking and most ‘immediate’, so to speak, being the ‘imagery’ of atoms and the many particles of various kinds into which they have lately become dissociated in the most recent physical theories (the result of this of course being that they are no longer in any sense atoms, which literally means ‘indivisibles’, though they go on being called by that name in the face of all logic). ‘Imagery’ is the right word, because it is no more than imagery in the minds of the physicists; but the ‘public at large’ believes firmly that real ‘entities’ are in question, such as could be seen and touched by anyone whose senses were sufficiently developed or who had at his disposal sufficiently powerful instruments of observation; is not that a ‘mythology’ of a most ingenuous kind? This does not prevent the same public from pouring scorn on the conceptions of the ancients at every opportunity, though of course they do not understand a single word about them; even admitting that there may have been ‘popular’ deformations at all times (‘popular’ being another word that people are very fond of using wrongly and ineptly, doubtless because of the growing importance accorded to the ‘masses’), it is permissible to doubt whether those deformations have ever been so grossly materialistic and at the same time so widely diffused as they are at present, thanks to the tendencies inherent in the mentality of today and at the same time to the much vaunted spread of a ‘compulsory education’ at once profane and rudimentary!

Too much time must not be spent on this subject, for it would lend itself to an almost indefinite development, since it leads too far afield from the main point at issue; it would for instance be easy to show that, by reason of the ‘survival’ of hypotheses, elements that really belong to different theories get superimposed and intermingled in such a way in popular notions that they sometimes form the most incongruous combinations; and in any case the contemporary mentality is made up in such a way that it readily accepts the strangest contradictions. But it will be more profitable to stress again a particular aspect of this subject, though admittedly this will involve some anticipation of considerations that will find their place later on, for it concerns things more properly belonging to a phase other than that which has been in view up till now, though these phases cannot be kept quite separate, for that would give much too ‘schematic’ an impression of our period. At the same time a glimpse can be given of the way in which the tendencies toward ‘solidification’ and toward dissolution, while they are apparently opposed in some respects, are nevertheless associated from the very fact that they act simultaneously in such a way as to come to an inevitable end in the final catastrophe. The aspect of affairs to which attention will now be directed is the quite particularly extravagant character assumed by the notions in question when they are carried over into a domain other than that to which they were originally intended to be applied; from such misapplications are derived most of the phantasmagoria of what has been called ‘neo-spiritualism’ in its various forms, and it is just such borrowings from conceptions belonging essentially to the sensible order which explain the sort of ‘materialization’ of the supra-sensible that is one of its most common characteristics.[51] Without seeking for the moment to determine more precisely the nature and quality of the supra-sensible, insofar as it is actually involved in this matter, it will be useful to observe how far the very people who still admit it and think that they are aware of its action are in reality permeated by materialistic influence: for even if they do not deny all extra-corporeal reality, like the majority of their contemporaries, it is only because they have formed for themselves an idea of it that enables them in some way to assimilate it to the likeness of sensible things, and to do that is certainly scarcely better than to deny it. There is no reason to be surprised at this, considering the extent to which all the occultist, Theosophist, and other schools of that sort are fond of searching assiduously for points of approach to modern scientific theories, from which indeed they draw their inspiration more directly than they are prepared to admit, and the result is what might logically be expected under such conditions. It may even be observed that, in accordance with the continuous changes in scientific theories, the resemblance between the conceptions of a particular school and a particular scientific theory may make it possible to ‘date’ the school, in default of any more precise information about its history and its origins.

This state of affairs had its beginning at the time when the study and the control of certain psychic influences descended, if it may be so expressed, into the profane domain, and this in a certain sense marks the beginning of the phase of ‘dissolution’ properly so called in the modern deviation. This time can broadly speaking be placed as far back as the eighteenth century, so that it is seen to be exactly contemporary with materialism itself, showing clearly that these two things, contraries in appearance only, had in fact to appear together; it does not seem that anything of the kind was in evidence at any earlier date, no doubt because the deviation had not then attained the stage of development that could make such a thing possible. The chief characteristic of the scientific ‘mythology’ of that period was the conception of ‘fluids’ of different kinds, all physical forces being imagined to exist in some such form; it is precisely this conception that was carried over from the corporeal order into the subtle order in the theory of ‘animal magnetism’. If this is related back to the idea of the ‘solidification’ of the world, it might perhaps be thought that a ‘fluid’ is by definition the opposite of a ‘solid’; but it is nonetheless true that in this case both play exactly the same part, because the conception of ‘fluids’ has the effect of ‘embodying’ things that really belong to subtle manifestation. The magnetizers were in a sense the direct precursors of ‘neo-spiritualism’, if indeed they were not really its first representatives; their theories and their practices influenced to a greater or lesser extent all the schools that came into being later, whether they were openly profane, like spiritualism, or whether they had pseudo-initiatic pretensions, like the many varieties of occultism. This persistent influence is all the more strange in that it seems quite disproportionate to the importance of the psychic phenomena, very elementary as they were, which constituted the field of experiment in magnetism; but perhaps even more astonishing is the part played by this same magnetism, right from the time of its first appearance, in turning aside from all serious work initiatic organizations that had still retained up to that time, if not a very far-reaching effective knowledge, at least an awareness of what they had lost in this respect and the will to do their best to recover it. It is permissible to suppose that this is not the least of the reasons for which magnetism was ‘launched’ at the appointed time, even though, as almost always happens in similar cases, its apparent promoters were acting only as more or less unconscious instruments.

The ‘fluidic’ conception survived in the common mentality, though not in the theories of physicists, at least up to about the middle of the nineteenth century (though expressions such as ‘electric fluid’ continued to be used for even longer, but more in a mechanical way and without a precise imagery any longer being attached to them); spiritualism, which came to birth at that period, inherited the conception all the more naturally through being predisposed to it by an original connection with magnetism; and this connection is much closer than might be at first supposed, for it is highly probable that spiritualism could never have reached any very considerable development but for the divagations of the somnambulists, and also that it was the existence of magnetic ‘subjects’ which prepared for and made possible the existence of spiritualist ‘mediums’. Even today most magnetizers and spiritualists continue to talk of ‘fluids’, and what is more, to believe seriously in them; this ‘anachronism’ is all the more strange in that these people are in general fanatical partisans of ‘progress’; such an attitude fits in badly with a conception that has for a long time been excluded from the scientific domain and so ought in their eyes to appear very ‘backward’. In the present-day mythology, ‘fluids’ have been replaced by ‘waves’ and ‘radiations’, these last in their turn of course effectively playing the part of ‘fluids’ in the theories most recently invented to try to explain the action of certain subtle influences; it should suffice to mention ‘radiaesthesia’ which is as ‘typical’ as possible in this respect. Needless to say, if it were only a question in all these affairs of mere images, of comparisons based on some analogy (and not on identity) with phenomena in the sensible order, the matter would not have very serious consequences, and might even be justified up to a point; but such is not the case, for the ‘radiaesthesists’ believe very literally that the psychic influences with which they are concerned are ‘waves’ or ‘radiations’ propagated in space in the most ‘corporeal’ manner that it is possible to imagine; moreover, thought itself does not escape from representation in this fashion. Here we find another case of the same ‘materialization’ continuing to assert itself in a new form, perhaps more insidious than that of ‘fluids’ because it may appear to be less crude; nonetheless the whole affair belongs fundamentally to exactly the same order and does no more than express the very limitations that are inherent in the modern mentality and consist in an incapacity to conceive of anything whatsoever outside the domain of the formation of mental images of sensible things.[52]

It is scarcely necessary to add that the ‘clairvoyants’, according to the schools to which they belong, go so far as to see ‘fluids’ or ‘radiations’, just as there are some, particularly among the Theosophists, who see atoms and electrons; here, as in many other matters, what they in fact see are their own mental images, which naturally always fit well with the particular theories they believe in. There are some who see the ‘fourth dimension’, and even other supplementary dimensions of space as well; and this leads to a few words in conclusion on another case that also appertains to ‘scientific mythology’, and might well be called the ‘delirium of the fourth dimension’. It must be agreed that ‘hypergeometry’ seems to have been devised in order to strike the imagination of people who have not enough mathematical knowledge to be aware of the true character of an algebraic construction expressed in geometrical terms, for that is really what ‘hypergeometry’ is; and it may be noted in passing that this is another example of the dangers of ‘popularization’. Moreover, well before the physicists had thought of bringing the ‘fourth dimension’ into their hypotheses (which had already become much more mathematical than really physical, because their character had become both increasingly quantitative and at the same time increasingly ‘conventional’) the ‘psychists’ (they were not yet called ‘metapsychists’ in those days) were already making use of it to explain phenomena in which one solid body appears to pass through another; and here again it was not for them a case of a mere picture ‘illustrating’ in some way what may be called ‘interferences’ between different domains or states, which would have been unobjectionable, but, according to their ideas, the body in question had quite genuinely passed through the ‘fourth dimension’. That was in any case only a beginning, and in recent years, under the influence of the new physics, occultist schools have been observed to go so far as to build up the greater part of their theories on this same conception of a ‘fourth dimension’; it may be noted also in this connection that occultism and modern science tend more and more to join up with one another as the ‘disintegration’ proceeds step by step, because both are traveling toward it by their different paths. The ‘fourth dimension’ will be spoken of again later from a different point of view; but enough has been said about that sort of thing for the present, and the time has come to turn to other considerations more directly related to the question of the ‘solidification’ of the world.