Science and the Infinite - Sydney T. Klein (free e books to read online .txt) 📗

is within us in the sense that we are interior and not exterior entities of the "Reality of Being."

We have now arrived at a point where we can better realise that the Absolute cannot be localised or bounded by space, and must be Omnipresent—cannot be conditioned in Time, and must therefore be Omniscient—the Here comprising all Space, and the Now all Time in the "Reality of Being."

With these conclusions before us I will ask you to form a new conception of Creation. All creation around us is the materialisation of the Thought of the Deity. He does not require time to think as we do—the whole of the Universe is therefore one instantaneous Thought of the Great Reality; the forming of this world and its destruction, the appearance of man, the birth and death of each one of us are absolutely at the same instant; it is only our finite minds which necessitate drawing this Thought out into a long line, and our want of knowledge and inability to grasp the whole, which force us to conceive that one event happened before or after another. In our finite way we examine and strive to understand this wondrous Thought, and at last, a Darwin, after a life spent in accumulating facts on this little isolated spot of the Universe, discovers what appears to be a law of sequence, and calls it the evolution theory; but this is probably only one of countless other modes by which the intent of that Thought is working towards completion, the apparent direction of certain lines on that great tracing board of the Creator, whereon is depicted the whole plan of His work.

Let me give a simple example of Creation by a "word," which even our finite minds can grasp. When I utter the word Cat, it starts a practically instantaneous thought in your minds, the power of that thought being dependent upon the knowledge you have gained. If you analyse it you will find that, though practically instantaneous, it comprises all the sensations you have ever felt on that subject throughout your life. It commenced, perhaps, when you were only a year old, and, sitting on your mother's knee, your hand was made to stroke a kitten, and you felt it was soft and it gave you pleasure. Later on, when you were older, you had it in your arms, and you felt the first intimation of that wonderful "στοργη," which manifests itself in most children in their love for dolls; you found it delightful to cuddle and that it purred. Later on, you found that it played with a reel of cotton, and that it could scratch, make horrid noises, and countless other things, which not only make up the life of a cat, but connect it with the world around us. All these thousand and one facts are now drawn out, by analysis in Time and Space, into a long line, and are placed one in front of the other; but the thought started by the word Cat was a fair example of an instantaneous creation.

One other example of an instantaneous thought. Let us suppose a large room fitted with, say, a hundred thousand volumes, comprising all the knowledge gained by every Specialist in every Science concerning the plan of Creation. In our finite minds, under the limits of Time and Space, the word representing the contents of that library would start, when uttered, an instantaneous thought analogous to that of our last example, according to the knowledge that each individual had already acquired of the contents of those books; but this knowledge had only been gained by taking down each volume separately and reading one book at a time, beginning at the beginning and taking each page and each word in succession, and a lifetime would not suffice to enable us to read them all; whereas, if our knowledge were complete, the word representing the contents of that room would start an instantaneous thought, comprising not only every book, but every chapter, page, word, letter, and punctuation contained in that library, or in one which comprised all knowledge from the beginning to the end of Time.

It is a well-known fact that at the approach of death, when the perceptive senses are completely, or almost completely, in abeyance, as in the "self-forgetting" referred to in "The Vision," the duration of Time appears to have no reality; in numerous cases of drowning, where the person has been no more than one or two minutes under water, the whole of a long life, with every forgotten trivial occurrence and the multitude of thoughts attached thereto, have been brought vividly before the mind, as it were, instantaneously; those also who have been put under nitrous-oxide gas, though the life of the body is not affected, know how, with departure of sense perception, the sense of Time is completely annihilated. I have myself experimented under such conditions, and attempted to realise the duration of time by counting steadily, one, two, three, four, &c., and had no knowledge whatever that between, say, "four" and "five" there was a complete hiatus of several minutes when, for me, time had vanished; I was still counting steadily when the anæsthetic had passed away, and it was quite impossible to realise that such time had elapsed, as I had not reached more than the twelfth count, whereas, according to the time expired, I should have reached the fiftieth or sixtieth. A number of examples of what may be called instantaneous thoughts created in the mind of a sleeper have been collected, and many of us have had similar experiences. I give one as an example: "Maury was ill in bed and dreamed of the French Revolution. Bloody scenes passed before him. He held long conversations with Robespierre, Marat, and other monsters of that time, was dragged before the tribunal, was condemned to death, and carried through a great crowd of people, bound to a plank. The guillotine severed his head from his shoulders. He woke with terror to find that a rail over the bed had got unfastened and had fallen upon his neck like a guillotine, and, as his mother who was sitting by him declared, at that very moment."

In the above case the whole scene was started instantaneously in his brain, but in waking his mind analysed it in Time and Space and spread it out into a long historical record. The opposite process to this, namely, the building up a thought-picture, is what we do every day when we form and combine our conceptions under the dominion of Time and Space, until we have accumulated in our minds a multitude of concepts which form as it were a single subject, somewhat analogous to a painter when he has completed his picture, a writer his book, an architect his house, or even a mechanic his machine. An interesting example of a musician constructing a thought-picture is given by Mozart himself: