"Prove it to me," says the spoon-man.
With a foot-rule you proceed to make measurements to show the rectangularity of the room in which you are standing. Simultaneously he makes measurements giving the same numerical results; for his foot-rule shrinks and curves in the exact proportion to give the true number of feet when he measures his shrunken and distorted rear wall. No measurement you can apply will prove you in the right, nor him in the wrong. Indeed he is likely to retort upon you that it is your room which is distorted, for he can show that in spite of all its nightmare aspects his world is governed by the same orderly geometry that governs yours.
The above illustration deals purely with space relations, for such relations are easily grasped; but certain distortions in time relations are no less absolutely imperceptible and unprovable. So far from having any advantage over the spoon-man, our plight is his. The Principle of Relativity discovers us in the predicament of the Mikado's "prisoner pent," condemned to play with crooked cues and elliptical billiard balls, and of the opium victim, for whom "space swells" and time moves sometimes swift and sometimes slow.
THE ORBITAL MOVEMENT OF TIME
Now if our space is curved in higher space, since such curvature is at present undetectable by us, we must assume, as Hinton chose to assume, that it curves in the minute, or, as some astronomers assume, that its curve is vast. These assumptions are not mutually exclusive: they are quite in analogy with the general curvature of the earth's surface which is in no wise interfered with by the lesser curvatures represented by mountains and valleys. It is easiest to think of our space as completely curved in higher space in analogy with the surface of a sphere.
Similarly, if time is curved, the idea of the cyclic return of time naturally (though not inevitably) follows, and the division of the greater cycles into lesser loops; for it is easier to assign this elliptical movement to time than any other, by reason of the orbital movements of the planets and their satellites. What results from conceptions of this order? Amazing things! If our space is curved in higher space, you may be looking toward the back of your own head. If time flows in cycles, in travelling toward to-morrow you may be facing yesterday.
This "eternal return," so far from being a new idea, is so old that it has been forgotten. Its reappearance in novel guise, along with so many other recrudescences, itself beautifully illustrates time curvature in consciousness. Yugas, time cycles, are an integral and inexpugnable part of Oriental metaphysics. "Since the soul perpetually runs," says Zoroaster, "in a certain space of time it passes through all things, which circulation being accomplished, it is compelled to run back again through all things, and unfold the same web of generation in the world." Time curvature is implicit in the Greek idea of the iron, bronze, silver, and golden ages, succeeding each other in the same order: the winter, seed-time, summer and harvest of the larger year. Astrology, seership, prophecy, become plausible on the higher-time hypothesis. From this point of view history becomes less puzzling and paradoxical. What were the Middle Ages but a forgetting of Greek and Roman civilization, and what was the Renaissance but a remembering of them—a striving to re-create the ruined stage-settings and to re-enact the urbane play of Pagan life. The spirit of the Crusades is now again animate throughout Europe. Nations are uniting in a Holy War against the Infidel de nos jours.
But it is in the individual consciousness that time curvature receives its most striking confirmation—those lesser returns and rhythms to which we give the name of periodicity. Before considering these, however, a fundamental fallacy of the modern mind must be exposed.
MATERIALITY THE MIRROR OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Our vicious habit of seeking the explanation of everything—even thought and emotion—in materiality, has betrayed us into the error of attributing to organic and environic changes the very power by which they are produced. We are wont to think of feeling, the form in which Being manifests to consciousness, as an effect instead of as a cause. When Sweet Sixteen becomes suddenly and mysteriously interesting to the growing boy, it is not because sex has awakened in his body, but because the dread time has come for him to contemplate the Idea of Woman in his soul. If you are sleepy, it is not because the blood has begun to flow away from your brain, but because your body has begun to bore you. Night has brought back the Idea of Freedom, and consciousness chloroforms the thing that clutches it. If you are ill, you grow cold or your temperature rises: it is the signal by which you know that your consciousness is turning toward the Idea of Pain.