Science and the Infinite; or, Through a Window in the Blank Wall

by Sydney T. Klein

Our present Conception, that the Earth turns round on its axis once every day, and rolls in its orbit round the Sun once in every year, may be called a Reality to our finite Senses; but I shall show later on that, except for the finiteness of our senses and the imperfection of our Knowledge, the Concept is not a true one. With perfect Perception and perfect Knowledge we shall see that, apart from the two limitations or modes under which our physical senses act, there can be no such thing as Motion, because the very essence of Motion is but the product of those limitations, namely, Time and Space.

We are so accustomed to take everything for granted, that it may perhaps seem strange to question whether it can even be asserted that we have ever seen matter. Let us turn towards a common object in this room. We catch in our eyes the multitudinous impulses which are reflected from its surface under circumstances somewhat similar to those in which a cricketer "fields" a ball; he puts his hand in the way of the moving ball and catches it, and, knowing the distance of the batsman, he perhaps recognises, by the hard impact of the ball, that the batsman has strong muscles, but he cannot be said to see the batsman by that impact, nor can he gain thereby any idea as to his character. So it is with objective intuition; we direct our eyes towards an object, and catch thereby rays of light reflected from that object at different angles, and, by combining all these directions, we recognise form, and come to the conclusion that we are looking at, say, a chair. The eye also tells us that rays are coming in greater quantity from some parts of it, and we know that those parts are polished; the eye again catches rays giving higher or lower frequencies of vibration, and we call that colour; our eyes also tell us that it intercepts certain rays reflected from other objects in the room, and we know that it is not transparent to light; and those are our sight perceptions of a wooden chair.

We may go a little further by "pushing," when we know, by the amount of resistance compared with the power exerted, what force of gravity is being exerted by and on that chair, and we declare it heavy or light, but by these means we get no nearer to the knowledge of what matter is. By tests and reagents we can resolve wood into other forms which we call Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, &c., which, because we cannot divide them into any other known substances, we call "Elements," but we can only look at these in the same way as we are looking at the chair. Chemists, however, carry us a little further, and show us that the Elementary substances have not only their likes and dislikes, but their passionate desires and lukewarmness to others of their ilk, and, when opportunity offers, they break up with great violence any ordinary friendship existing between them and their neighbours, and seize on their coveted prey with a strength of will surpassing anything experienced in the Organic World; and this new association they maintain, until they, in their turn, are dispossessed, or they encounter another substance of still greater attraction, when they leave their first love and take up new connections.

I shall touch upon the subject of what matter is later on; meanwhile let us consider how, owing to our senses being limited by the considerations of Time and Space, we are surrounded by inconceivables, and yet it is those very inadequate conceptions which force us to acquire Knowledge; the greatest incentive we have to pursue our investigation is, as we have seen, the fact that Perception without sufficient Knowledge leads us into difficulties. Let me give you two instances of these inconceivables. Infinite Space is inconceivable by us, but it is also quite as inconceivable, or perhaps even more so, to think of Space being limited, and yet we are forced to declare that one of these two must be true. Again, Matter is either composed of ultimate bodies, of a certain size which cannot be divided, or is infinitely divisible; both of these are inconceivable, the latter for the same reason as that of the Infinity of Space, and the former because it is inconceivable that the ultimate body could not be divided into two parts by a sharp edge forced between its two sides, or by a stronger force than at present holds it together; it has indeed been suggested as an explanation that, if an atom could be divided, it might cease to be matter, that its parts would have no existence, but it is difficult to conceive how two nothings can form one something.

Another example of Perception leading to a false Concept is our Sense of Pain; we apply a red-hot coal to the tip of one of our fingers and our Perception would have us believe that we feel intense pain at the point of contact, but we know this to be a false Concept, as it can be shown that the pain is only felt at the brain: there are in communication with different parts of our body small microscopical nerve threads, any of which may be severed with a pen-knife close to the base of the skull, with the result that no pain can then be felt, although the fingertip is just as much alive and is seen to be burning away.

Another example is our Sense of Hearing. A musical sound is made up of a certain number of pushes in a second, but each push is silent. It is only, as we have seen, a musical sound to our Sense when the pushes recur at intervals of not more than the sixteenth part of a second. The prongs of a tuning-fork, vibrating 500 times per second, seem to be travelling very quickly, but are really only moving at the rate of 10 inches per second, or not much over half a mile per hour, when the amplitude is the hundredth part of an inch, which gives quite a loud sound.

Light is also composed of rills in the Ether, but the rill itself is not Light, it is only Light when these rills strike, with a certain enormous frequency, on a special organ adapted for, we might say, counting these frequencies, and if these frequencies fall below that certain number, or above twice that number per second, there is no Sense of Sight.

How few people have ever realised what a wonderful Counting Machine they possess in their organ of Sight! I think the best method I can adopt, to bring this clearly before you, is to take our tuning-fork, vibrating 500 times per second, a rapidity which to some will be even difficult to comprehend, and then ask you to consider how long that fork must continue to vibrate before it has accomplished the full number of frequencies, which must necessarily impinge upon the eye in one second of time, before the phenomenon of sight becomes possible. That tuning-fork would have not only to continue its vibrations without diminution for seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, or hundreds of years, but for 30,000 years before it has accomplished the full number of pulsations which, as Ether waves, must strike the eye in one second of time, to give the impression of Light; the calculation is easy, the rills of Red Light are so small that 40,000 of these only cover one inch of length, and light travels 186,000 miles per second. If therefore the number of inches in 186,000 miles are multiplied by the 40,000, and the product is divided by the 500 times which the tuning-fork vibrates in one second, you have the number of seconds that tuning-fork must vibrate, before it has completed the number of impacts which, in one second of time, must fall on our retina to give us the impression of red light; and that tuning-fork would have to vibrate nearly twice as long, say 50,000 years, to reach the number of impulses which strike the eye in one second of time and give the impression of violet light; and between these two limits are situated the colours—Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Indigo.

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.