Science and the Infinite by Sydney T. Klein (black male authors .txt) 📕

What a marvellous sense then is Sight, when we find that, not only can it grasp these innumerable vibrations, but can actually differentiate colours, appreciating as a different colour each increase of about one-tenth in these multitudinous frequencies; and it is principally by means of this Sense of Sight that we gain a knowledge of what is happening around us. And yet what strides we have made in the last two hundred years to improve upon that instrument! With all its wonderful capabilities, we shall see later on that the eye is a very imperfect instrument for seeing very small objects, or even large objects when at a great distance. With the present compound Microscope, only developed in the last hundred years, and its apochromatic lenses, invented only in the last forty years, we are able to see and photograph objects of a minuteness immeasurably beyond the power of the human eye, and, with our telescopes, we can see and photograph stars far beyond the possibility of vision by the unaided eye; and yet, by the stellar spectroscope, we are actually able to examine and identify the very atoms of which that distant star is composed, or rather was composed hundreds of thousands of years ago; we can compare those atoms with the same atoms in our laboratories, and we find that, though the former are hundreds of thousands of years older than the latter, they show absolutely no signs of wear or loss of energy, though they have been for that enormous time, and are still, pulsating at the rate of not only millions but billions of times per second; and though the pulsations they emit have travelled across such a vast depth of space that the mind cannot even imagine the distance, there has not been any diminution in the numbers of pulsations per second, nor the slightest slowing down of the rate of flight at which they started on their journey from that far-off world. If there had been the slightest change we could detect it at once by means of the Spectroscope.

With another instrument we are able, not only to hear but to converse audibly, as long as we like, with another human being a thousand miles away, who is also sitting comfortably in his own arm-chair and speaking to us with as much freedom as though we were both in the same room. With another instrument we can go further, and exchange thoughts, in a few seconds, with a being on the other side of the world, by means of a thin wire that is itself fixed, and does not move, and we have lately invented another means by which we can do the same, over several thousands of miles, without even a connecting wire. With another instrument we have gone far beyond the facility with which the Printing press enabled us to communicate our thoughts to our fellow human beings, we can actually imprint our very words and laughter upon a wax cylinder and send it to the antipodes, and our friends there, with a similar instrument, can not only hear and recognise our very voice, but can make that voice repeat our thoughts audibly, to a thousand others at the same time, and can repeat that process for hundreds of times without exhausting that voice. With another instrument we can depict on a film, not only the images of our friends but their very actions, which may also be sent to any distance, and the persons, thereon depicted, may be seen by their relatives alive and going about their everyday employments, with every movement exact to life. We can cross the Ocean against the wind and waves by means of harnessed sunbeams, without any exertion of our own, at the rate of an express train, which train, by the by, is also moved by the same means; we can dive to the bottom of the sea and journey there for hours, in perfect safety, without coming to the surface, and we are even developing wings, or their equivalent, which from immemorial tradition we were not to possess before we had finished doing our duty properly in this world and had gained admission to the next.

We can do all these things, but how ignorant we still are in the commonest doings of Nature! By giving up our whole lifetime, and spending millions of pounds, we could never make a grain of wheat or an acorn, and wherever we turn we find ourselves confronted with mysteries beyond our power to explain from a finite material standpoint; even in material vibrations we meet a mystery almost beyond our power to comprehend. Take for instance those small insects, of the family of Grasshoppers, which make the primæval woods of Central America give out a noise like the roaring of the sea, a wondrous sound never to be forgotten by those who have heard it. By means of a kind of rasp one of these insects creates a sound which Darwin states can be heard to the distance of one mile: these insects weigh less than the hundredth part of an ounce, and the instrument by which the noise is made, weighs much less than one-tenth of the total insect; it is less therefore than one thousandth part of an ounce in weight, and yet it is found, by calculation, that this small instrument is actually able to move at the enormous rate of a thousand vibrations per second and keep in motion for hours, from five to ten million tons of matter, and it does this so powerfully that every particle of that enormous bulk of matter gives out a sound audible to our ears. But even these millions of tons are not its limit of action, for we know that these vibrations must go on until, in the end, every particle of matter connected with this earth has been affected by each of those vibrations.

All our difficulties of understanding the true meaning of these and other phenomena around us are, as I have already pointed out, caused by our inability to recognise that vibration or motion has no reality, it is a pseudo-conception arising from the fact that our senses are entirely dependent upon the two modes or limitations, Time and Space, for their very action, and that, as conceptional knowledge is based upon perceptional knowledge, our very consciousness of living is also dependent upon these same limitations. We have seen that Motion is nothing but the product of these two modes of perceptions, and, in my next Views, I shall examine these elusive limitations, these two mysteries of Time and Space, the forever and the never-ending; I shall trace them to the utmost limit of our conception, and try to gain thereby a clearer insight into the fact, not only that the whole Physical Universe is but a transient and Space-limited phenomenon, a thin film which our senses have erected and which divides us from the Reality, but that, if our power of introspection were fully developed, we should know that the Reality is nearer and dearer to us, and has much more to do with us, even in this life, than has the physical.

We have seen that our very thoughts, and therefore consciousness of living, are limited by Time and Space, but we cannot with the utmost endeavour conceive a limit to Time and Space; they are two twin sisters, alike in many respects but different in others, and we shall realise later on that they are readily interchangeable. The sensuous aspect of Motion is, as we have seen, the time that an object takes to go over a certain space—namely, what is called the rate at which it passes from one point to another, and we cannot imagine Motion unless it contains both of these modes in however small a quantity; we may have the greatest imaginable space traversed in a moment of time, or the smallest imaginable space covered in what may be called, for want of a better word, an eternity, but we still have to postulate what we call Motion; this, of course, follows from the fact that our thoughts require both these modes for forming concepts. If we compare our conception of Matter with that of Time and Space, we see that the two latter are not separately the object of any sense, but are the modes or conditions under which all our senses act, to a greater or less degree, and these conditions cannot therefore carry the same impression of objectivity to our senses as Matter does, except perhaps in the sense that all physical phenomena are simply motion, and motion is the product of both of these limitations but not of either of them separately.

If we analyse our conceptions of Time and Space we seem forced to postulate that they are both infinitely divisible and infinitely extensible; they are both what is called continuous and not discrete, we cannot conceive any minimum in their division; both duration in Time and extension in Space can be reduced, as it were, to a mathematical point; nor can we conceive any maximum in either duration or extension. They are both therefore comprised in every conception possible to our consciousness; all parts of Time are time and all parts of Space are space; there are no holes, as it were, in Space which are not space, nor intervals in Time which are not time, they are both complete units; Space cannot be limited except by space, and Time cannot be limited except by time. So far they are alike, but, on the other hand, Space is comprised of three dimensions—namely, length, breadth, and depth, whereas Time has the appearance to us of comprising one dimension only—namely, length.

Under our present conditions we can only think of one finite subject at a time, and, at that moment, all other subjects are cancelled. We can therefore only think of points in Time and Space as situated beyond, or in front of, other fixed points, which again must be followed by other points; we cannot fix a point in either so as to exclude the thought of a point beyond; we can only in fact examine them in a form of finite sequences.

The Idea of Infinity, which we shall refer to in a later View and show to be a false conception, is therefore a necessary result of the limitation of our thoughts; our physical Ego cannot conceive beyond the Finite as long as we are conscious of living under present conditions. With every act of perception by our senses, we have therefore not only intuition of the Visible or Finite, but we become at the same moment aware of an Invisible Infinite beyond. Time appears to us as an inconceivable, intangible something, which gives us the impression of movement without anything that moves it. Space is an omnipresent, intangible, inconceivable nothing, outside of which nothing which has existence can be even thought to exist. Let us now try and get an insight into what we mean by perception of distance in space.

The appreciation of distance depends upon what is called parallax, or the apparent displacement of projectment of an object when seen by our two eyes separately. If you hold up a finger and look at it, with each eye separately, you will see that the finger is projected by each eye on to a different part of the