The mystery of space

by Robert T. Browne

If the appearance of a choppy sea disturbed by the passage of a brisk breeze over its surface be imagined, a similitude of the great ocean of life may be envisaged. The wavelet crests symbolize the egos; the base of the wavelet which is one with the great sea of water represents the Thinker which is one with the divine life and consciousness of the kosmos. Just as wavelet crests are continually springing up and falling back into the sea, so are egos continually being cast forth and reabsorbed into the universality of life only to be recast, as a wavelet crest or ego, upon the surface of the moving ocean of life. And so, in this respect, the universum of life and consciousness which are essentially one is in a constant state of ever-becoming, un-becoming and re-becoming.

Another implication is that, on account of the diversity and complexity of the means of contact with the external world, it is not possible for the ego to arrive at more than a fragmentary understanding of even the latent geometrism of life, mind and materiality. In our examination of the sensuous world, we are very much like the three blind men set to examining an elephant. One set to scrutinizing his trunk by means of his sense of feeling. When asked for his judgment as to what the elephant was he declared it was a snake; a second who began with the legs found it to be like huge pillars; and a third who caught hold of the elephant's tail and declared the elephant to be like a rope. Each one of the blind men described what he was able to perceive. To each what he felt was all there was upon which he could render judgment. And so, artists, philosophers, mathematicians, musicians, mechanicians, religious seers, metaphysicians and all other types of mind, are just so many blind men set to the examination of an elephant, or the sensuous world. Each one confidently believes his view to be correct; each one is satisfied with the deliveries of his senses. Yet no one of them is wholly correct, no one of them has seen every phase and aspect of the problem. Does it not, therefore, appear to be the more reasonable and urgent that the view which synthesizes the judgments of all the possible examiners thereby constructing a composite idea of the entire mass of judgments is the more reliable and the more correct?

Referring again to the dual intelligence, the ego and the Thinker, which together constitute man, it is deemed necessary, in order to present the concept of this duality to the mind of the reader in the way that shall enable him easily to recall it, to designate the egoic intelligence as the egopsyche, and the Thinker's intelligence as the omnipsyche.

The egopsyche is the I-making faculty, the faculty of self-consciousness and the synthesis of all those psychic states and functions known as the intellect or mind and includes the ethical aspect of man's nature. The omnipsyche is the organism of kosmic consciousness, the space-mind, or man's higher self and that which connects with or allies him to all life; it is the basis of human unity and of unity with divinity, just as the egopsyche is the basis of separation and individuality; it is the organ of direct and instantaneous cognition and the permanent essence which has persisted through every form which the being, man, has ever assumed and through every stage of human evolution. In it are stored up the memories of the Thinker's past, the secrets of life, mind, being, reality, and the history of life from the beginning; in it also the plan of action for the future of the life-wave as it passes from plane to plane, from stage to stage, and from form to form. It is the spark from the flame that is never quite free from its source; it is the continuous spark, the prolonged ray which does not go out and cannot be extinguished. It is that in man which when full union therewith has been attained makes him a god in full consciousness.

The omnipsyche is really a neglected and overlooked factor in the doctrine of evolution. Evolutionists, while they claim life to be continuous and that man has come through all the kingdoms of nature in succession and has spent millions of years in the perfection of his various organs, faculties and stages of consciousness, make no ample allowance for what is in reality the basal element in evolution—a continuous, persisting, permanent life-force which does not lose its identity from the beginning to the end of the process. This fact—that that spark of life which set out upon the evolutionary journey as a moneron has glowed steadily from that stage to manhood, maintaining meantime its original purposiveness and intent—seems to be the most obvious consideration of the whole doctrine, yet it has been more or less completely ignored. The elementary requirements of evolution would seem to establish clearly the necessity for some such eternally persisting principle as the omnipsyche which is capable of such subtle adaptations to every conceivable form of life and in which should be gathered up the evolutionary results of every life-cycle. For this purpose the omnipsyche or unifying principle in man was designed from the beginning and it is that which constitutes the basis of his intellectual nature while in a far larger sense it is the divinity in man himself. It is indeed strange that so important a factor as the omnipsyche should have been omitted by evolutionists. Yet it can be accounted for upon the grounds of the purely mechanistic character of all intellectual attempts at solving the problems of vital manifestations. But so long as men rely upon mechanical explanations of such phenomena so long will they be prone to overlook the very essentialities of the problems which they devoutly wish to solve. The continuity of the physical germ-plasm of the human species,[27] now quite generally admitted, would suggest, it seems, an analogous condition to the continuity of the psychic plasm called the omnipsyche, the only difference being that the omnipsyche is an intelligent factor while the physical plasm is a medium of transmission though non-intelligent. The omnipsyche is, therefore, the psychic reservoir of evolution into which are stored the transmuted psychics of moneron, amoeba, jellyfish and every other form which it has ensouled and acts as the storeroom of man's psychic operations as well as the source of his intellectuality.

We turn now from the study of a sketch of the mechanism of man's consciousness which gives at its best only a fragmentary view of the universe of spatiality to a consideration of space itself in the light of its interrelational bearings upon the question of intellectuality.

In the chapter on the "Genesis and Nature of Space" we have, in tracing out the engenderment of space, proved it to be basically one with matter (and indeed the progenitor of matter), also with life and consciousness. Further, it has been shown that all the characteristics of materiality are due to the adaptation of consciousness to it and that out of this adaptation grew the intellectuality. A close approximation to this view was maintained by Kant when he discovered that our faculty of thinking or the intellect only finds again in matter the mathematical order or properties which our faculty of perceiving or consciousness has deposed there. It appears, therefore, that when the intellect approaches matter or spatiality it finds always a ready yieldance to its demands simply because intellectuality has previously established therein the delineation or map of the path over which it necessarily must traverse in its examination of the object of its pursuit. In other words, the kosmic mind in engendering materiality and spatiality has set up therein a kosmic order or geometrism. Both motor and intellectual progress, therefore, can be made through the world of spatiality because of the immanence of this kosmic geometrism which lies latent in the very fabric of the world of substance fashioning both the character and the nature of the intellect as well as of space itself. So that there is a perfect congruity subsisting between spatiality and intellectuality. Accordingly it is impossible for either one or the other to transcend the grim grasp of the mathematical order which binds them in such lasting and fundamental agreement. Extra-spatiality may degrade itself into spatiality, and indeed in the very nature of the case, does so degrade itself, yet spatiality can never raise itself beyond the limits set by its engendering parent. Materiality may become more and more spatialized and consciousness more and more intellectualized, but they must proceed hand-in-hand one not superseding the other.

Being the essence of the natural geometry which is everywhere immanent in the universum of matter, space becomes an organized and ordered extension, in fact is the totality of such organized and ordered extension, which conforms to the latent geometrism the engenderment of which it is the sole cause in the last analysis. Does it not appear then that all that mass of artificial geometry which has sprung up as a result of departures made from this natural geometry is utterly baseless and most certainly lacking in the kosmic agreement which spatiality lends to our primary conceptions? Of course, it is admittedly possible to devise certain conventional forms of logic and endow them with all the evidences of a rigid consistency but which, because of their purely artificial character, will fall far short of any real conformity to the potential geometrism which has been established in spatiality. And this fact is of utmost significance for all those who seek to find justification either logically or naturally for the existence of a multi-dimensional quality in space; for, if a clear, discriminative conception as to the categorical relationship, each to each, of the two kinds of geometry be carried in mind, it will not be easy to confound them neither will it be difficult to discern where the one ends and the other begins.

Now, the fourth dimension and the entirety of those mathematical speculations touching upon the question of hyperspace, dimensionality, space-curvature and the manifoldness of space are purely conventional and arbitrary contrivances and do not meet with any agreement or authority in the native geometrism which we find inhering in space and which the intellect recognizes there. This conclusion seems to be obvious for the reason that, in the first place, the non-Euclidean geometries have been constructed upon the basis of a negation of the latent geometrism of space and intellectuality; and if so, is it reasonable to expect that either they or any of their conclusions should accord with the nature of that form of geometry so admirably delineated by Euclid? Obviously not. It is a matter of historical knowledge that the whole of the artificial non-Euclidean geometries consists of those purely conventional results which investigators arrived at when they denied or controverted the norms supplied by the natural geometry. When metageometricians found that they could neither prove nor disprove the Euclidean parallel-postulate they then set upon the examination of idealized constructions which negatived the postulate. The results, thus obtained, although self-consistent enough, were compiled into systems of geometry which naturally were at variance with each other and with this inherent geometrism which is found in spatiality and answered to by the intellect both normally and logically.

Furthermore, there is another consideration which to us seems to be equally if not more forbidding, in its objections to the coördination of the two systems of geometry, and that is the fact that the geometry of hyperspace is denied the corroborative testimony of experience and this is true of practically the whole of its data. Indeed, there is perhaps no single element in its entire constitution which claims the authority of experience. This is undoubtedly the weakest point in the structure of the hyperspatial geometries. Contrarily, such is not the case with the natural geometry; for, in this, the intellect in retracing its steps over the path laid out by that movement which has at the same time created both the intellect and spatiality, finds an orderly and commodious arrangement into which it naturally and easily falls. So exact is this agreement of the intellect with the kosmic order that if it were possible to remove the whole of spatiality and materiality there would still be left the frame work which is this latent geometrism of kosmogenesis. But the fact that the intellect naturally fills all the interstices of materiality and spatiality, fitting snugly into all of them as if molded for just that purpose, by no means warrants the assumption that it would or does also fit the engendering factor which has created these interstices. The frame work, the order or the geometrism of the kosmos has been established by life acting consciously upon the universum of materiality. And in order to establish this geometrism life had to be mobile, active, creative. It could not remain static, immobile, and accomplish it. Being mobile, dynamic, creative, it passes on. It is like a fashioning tool which the cabinet makers use in cutting out designs upon a piece of wood. It moves, and keeps moving until the design is finished, and then it is ready for more designing. Life is like that. It cuts out the designs in materiality, fashions the form, molds the material, and passes on to other forms. The intellect fits into these designs gracefully. But what it finds is not life itself, only the design which life has made. Hence, as there is neither an empirical spatiality nor materiality in conformity with which the artificial geometry of the analyst may be said to exist, and as it may not be said to conform to the path which life has made in passing through either of these, it is absurd to predicate it upon the same basis as the natural geometry. And so, we are forced, in the light of these considerations to deny the validity and hence the acceptability of the non-Euclidean geometries as either reasonable or warrantable substitutes for the Euclidean, and denying which we also formally ignore the claims of the fourth dimension, as mathematically designed, to any legitimate anchorage in either our vital or intellectual movements.