Second Sight (20 page)
Authors: Neil M. Gunn
“Oh, splendid, Marjory!” exclaimed Joyce.
Mr. Blair laughed and clapped his hands. “Bravo! But I refuse to retract. Why? Because, according to Colonel Brown, intuition is the process of reasoning in the fourth dimension.” His face became portentously solemn. “He can explain it to you. You will appreciate it. Alas, it is too deep for me.” And he wagged his rubicund face and bald head.
Marjory's assumed innocence collapsed graciously and a warmth came into the room, so that Mr. Blair insisted on pouring out glasses of portâit did not occur to him to pour anything elseâwith little exaggerated mannerisms and eyetwinklings. Joyce very nearly called him a dear, funny old thing as he filled her glass to the brim.
“Gentlemen, the ladies!”
Then, setting down his glass and still standing, he pressed his palms against his sides, lifted up his chest, and asked, “Now where were we?”
“Awaiting the evidence,” said Geoffrey slily.
“Ha, you scientists,” said Mr. Blair, wagging a finger. “It's not evidence you want of second sight: it's the fun of knocking it into a cocked hat.”
There was a burst of laughter at this unexpected sally and Mr. Blair sat down, happy as a schoolboy to have brought ease and mirth to his guests. It was his experience that there is nothing like a “subject for discussion” to keep guests reasonably animatedâthe possibilities of variation in subjects and guests being, of course, infinite.
“Now would it be too much for me to ask you to assume”, he said, addressing Geoffrey politely and pointing to the coal scuttle, “that this is the cocked hat?”
“I think so,” said Geoffrey. “It's a bit too full to hold all the rubbish.” And he laughed loudly.
“You frankly don't believe it?” asked Colonel Brown, with his guarded humour.
“No,” replied Geoffrey. “Do you?”
“I am inclined on the whole to say yes. The evidence regarding prevision is pretty mixed, but there is evidence. It is not perhaps conclusive evidence, but still it is evidence. And mathematically once you admit dimensions beyond the third, the thing does at least appear to be feasible.”
“I see,” said Geoffrey, with the smile that implied he had heard that sort of reasoning before. “But I am inclined to be impressed only by evidence. We can say, of course, that anything is possible. That may be an inspiration to the scientist, but it is hardly anything more.”
Colonel Brown smiled and nodded. “You are quite right. But still we have got to work with the tools we have. Like you, I prefer physics to metaphysics. But the possibility of the existence of second sight in no way interferes with physics. It is an interesting speculation scientifically because of the existence of certain evidence and of our power to bring mathematics to bear upon it.”
“What form does this evidence take?” Geoffrey asked.
“Several forms. There is the evidence of what certain thinkers can do in the East; there is the evidence, never properly sifted, of second sight in the Highlandsâand elsewhere; there is the recorded evidence of dreams, in which future incidents are foreseen; there is a tremendous body of miscellaneous evidence, dealt with by the Psychical Research Society and other groups or individuals. The persistence of the idea, together with these manifestations, is also something.”
“Yoga, serialism, and all that. Quite.” Geoffrey smiled sceptically. “As for the origin and persistence of the idea, any sound anthropologist can deal with it adequately and satisfactorily. Take something similar, like water-divining. It has had for itself an almost equal persistence and belief. In fact, the Government of India recently employed one of our most famous diviners, Major Pogson, to find drinking water in certain Indian villages. He divined one hundred and twenty-four villages and was successful in locating drinking sites for one hundred and two of them. That seemed good enough working evidence. Yet under laboratory tests in Cambridge, he failed.”
“That is very interesting,” replied Colonel Brown, “but hardly analogous. For example, if we took the diviner out over Farquhar's croft, he might divine water at a certain spot. We dig and find water. But if we dug at a dozen other spots we might also find water. We don't knowâand could not know without digging the whole place up. That the diviner is extremely skilled in finding water is obvious from his results. But that skill
might
come from a fine co-ordination of the senses under a good geological eye. Much as a man has a good eye for a horse or for aâwell, for something equally fastâor an unusual ear for music.
“There is another kind of evidence, however, in which one single instance proves a whole belief or hypothesis to be valid. Take Ross and his mosquitoes. Ross got the belief that mosquitoes carried the malaria germ. So back he went to India and began dissecting mosquitoes. Out of hundreds of species he first of all had to find the right species. The authorities were against him. The microscopic study of bacteria was regarded as a new fad. Authoritative opinion is very often against the pioneer. It was August and the weather was stifling. Ross had dissected in the course of time about a thousand mosquitoes. The mere dissection of each mosquito took at least two hours. Imagine the colossal labour; the amount of belief necessary to carry on; and nothing but failure a thousand times over. Then one day, the sweat running into his eyes, a crack in the eye-piece of his microscope, his sight badly strained, he is just about to give up work, when he sees the incriminating dark stain, and in that moment his whole case was established and humanity became his debtor for a supremely important scientific discovery.
“Similarly about this prevision. If I could assert, as the result of what I may call a vision, that something was going to happen to you in the future, involving factors of which I could demonstrably have no previous knowledge, and if such happening did take place, then I should be expressing a knowledge acquired otherwise than by means of my five senses. And such knowledge, whether we elected to call it second sight, clairvoyance, or any other name, would be a
fact
, calling, of course, for scientific investigation and, if possible, explanation. But that again, as Dean Cameron says, would require that the scientist investigating the fact, was, in fact, competent to assess it.”
“You desiderate some special kind of scientist?”
Geoffrey's sarcasm was not lost on Colonel Brown, but he appeared to enjoy it rather than otherwise. “Well, I merely mean that a man, let us say, who is exclusively a chemist, would hardly be the right kindââ”
“Hah-haw!” observed George, and amid the general merriment Colonel Brown looked blank, until, glancing at Geoffrey, he realised that he must have put his foot in it.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sure I had no idea that I was intruding upon a real chemist,” and was forced to laugh himself.
“It's all right,” said Geoffrey, smiling, but flushed a trifle.
“It's the more absurd”, said Colonel Brown, “because obviously you and I, trained to the scientific attitude, should be in league against the metaphysicians.”
“But actually,” said the Dean, “is it not true that practically everyone is on Mr. Smith's side? That there is an instinctive desire
not
to believe in second sight? That it arouses antipathy and fear? It is the unknown, and the unknown we dread. And when anyone can show that it is untrue, we are in our hearts relieved?”
By the nature of the silence that followed it would seem that this expressed a general truth.
Mr. Blair turned to Geoffrey. “How would you set about showing it was untrue?”
“Well, it seems to me simple enough,” Geoffrey replied. “Second sight, like any other illusion or delusion, is due entirely to the mechanical condition of the brain. It results from certain physiological adjustments or maladjustments. It has no more to do with time or eternity than, may I say, an eructation produced by an internal stomachic condition. I would make the suggestion that currents of nervous energy get short-circuited in a temporary derangement or muddle of the brain paths along which they usually travel, and you get a spark at the wrong place. That's about all.
“Now consider. If you don't accept that, where are you? If the manifestation we call second sight is not the spontaneous product of the mechanical functioning of the brain, then it must be induced by some power or animus or spirit independent of the grey matter. An arbitrary and miraculous interference by an over-soul or something like that. Once you admit that special kind of interference where are we, and, in particular, where is science? And, in any case, why do it, why call in an hypothesis based on miracle, when we know that a mechanical interpretation can explain it all? Surgeons and psycho-analysts deal successfully with deranged brains in vast quantities daily. Economy is an important word for a scientist, and he has even made a scientific law called the Economy of Hypothesis.”
Geoffrey had been speaking so forcefully that he wiped his mouth. Then he smiled and drank off his wine.
“Excellent,” said Mr. Blair, filling up Geoffrey's glass. “To tell the real truth, that rather tallies with my own severely classical attitude. Could you also do a service to my mind on this matter of dreams? Who is the gentleman, againâMr. Dunne?”
“As far as I have been able to gather,” said Geoffrey, “a dream is quite an irrational performance. It may be good in parts, like the curate's egg, for those who are looking for marvels, but surely it hardly provides a basis on which to build a real scientific edifice.”
“I think you are quite brilliant to-night, Geoffrey,” said Lady Marway, with a friendly smile.
George asked if he might lead the cheers at the dispersal of the mist. There was laughter and cigarette-smoking and some more wine. Then Joyce said nonchalantly, “You have really got to get lost in the mist to appreciate decent headlights.” And was a little surprised, and secretly deeply flattered, at the reception her words got, for she had been thinking simply of her own experience. Long discussions usually bored her to tears. She now looked very animated.
The focus of attention had shifted from Geoffrey to Colonel Brown, who, before he drank, said with a smile, “I am inclined to be impressed only by evidence.”
“Ha! ha! and so we come back to where we started from. Which is doubtless”, said Mr. Blair to Marjory, “what you would expect?”
“You don't subscribe altogether to Mr. Smith's mechanistic theory?” the Dean asked Colonel Brown.
“I'm afraid not. In so far as it does not cover all the facts, it must be unsatisfactory. For example, I happened to mention the word serialism, and clearly Mr. Smith was not impressed, any more than he was by Mr. Dunne's dreams, wherein it is made to appear that Mr. Dunne foresaw the happening of certain events. Now Mr. Dunne is an army man like myself, obviously an able mathematician, and his attitude is selfevidently scientific. He is not concerned about inducing mystical states. He is a frank inquirer who takes you step by step in a very practical and logical and even humorous way. Just let us look for a moment at an instance of the sort of thing he presents in his
An Experiment with Time
. He had a dream, involving an argument with a waiter as to whether it was halfpast four in the morning or in the afternoon. On looking at his watch in the dream he found that it had stopped at half-past four. He awoke, lit a match, hunted for his watch, found it on a chest of drawers, and discovered it was stopped at half-past fourâand subsequently proved that it must have stopped just before he got out of bed, that is, at the actual moment of the dream. Thinking about this experience one morning later on in Sorrento, he wondered if it were possible for him to tell the time on his watch at that particular moment. He shut his eyes and concentrated, got into a half-doze, and presently the watch appeared in front of him, surrounded by a sort of white mist. The vision was binocular, upright, about a foot from his nose, and lit by ordinary daylight. The hour hand stood at eight o'clock. The minute hand swung between twelve and one. Dividing the arc of the swing, he decided that the time was two and a half minutes past eight. Having so decided, he opened his eyes, reached out under the mosquito curtains, got hold of his watch, pulled it in, held it up before himâand saw that the time on the watch was precisely two and a half minutes past eight.”
“That sounds marvellous,” said Lady Marway. “But what sort of relation has it to second sight?”
“Well, it would appear that he had had second sight or prevision of himself looking at his watch. The white mist was the mosquito netting outside the focus of attention. He had foreseen himself doing something before he had actually done it.”
“And how does he account for it?”
“Ah, that's a long argument. Only he does attempt to account for it, not at all on the basis of miracle, but on a basis of mathematics and the existence of dimensions beyond the third. Now mathematics is the sort of thing that we all are prepared to pin our faith to. The absolutely pure science. Yet mathematics constantly deals with what should be to usâand areâquite fantastically imaginary things like, say, the square root of
minus
one. Consider, for example, such a simple thing as this: unless you can add something to less than nothing to make it equal to nothing, there would be no algebra. Do you remember the old school difficulty of trying to understand how two
minuses
make a
plus
? Mathematics also deals confidently with what are to us even more difficult to imagine, namely, dimensions beyond the third. Yet mathematics gets its marvellously valid and indisputable results.”
“I wish I could understand the fourth dimension,” said Helen.
To the smiling faces, Colonel Brown shook his head. “That is difficult. We can't make a mental picture of the fourth dimension, as we can of the first, second, and third dimensions. Just as we can't make a mental picture of a minus quantity. We can only sort of hint at it. The first dimension, as you know, is a straight line, without any breadth or thickness, just a pure line. The second is a surface, having length and breadth but no thickness. The third has length, breadth, and thicknessâlike all of us in this room, and of course like the room itself. Our physical world is entirely three-dimensional. Now try to imagine that this white square of linenâlet me unpin it and spread it on the floorâis two-dimensional only. That is, it is a surface, with no depth. Now imagine an equally flat living creature, a two-dimensional bug, let us say. This then would be its whole world, its universe. It could not conceive, could not picture, anything outside it. But I, moving in three dimensions, can bend down and lift it off its world up onto another world. This action of mine would be to it a pure miracle. But to usâwe merely smile. It's a common illustration. Do you get it at all?”
Mr. Blair laughed and clapped his hands. “Bravo! But I refuse to retract. Why? Because, according to Colonel Brown, intuition is the process of reasoning in the fourth dimension.” His face became portentously solemn. “He can explain it to you. You will appreciate it. Alas, it is too deep for me.” And he wagged his rubicund face and bald head.
Marjory's assumed innocence collapsed graciously and a warmth came into the room, so that Mr. Blair insisted on pouring out glasses of portâit did not occur to him to pour anything elseâwith little exaggerated mannerisms and eyetwinklings. Joyce very nearly called him a dear, funny old thing as he filled her glass to the brim.
“Gentlemen, the ladies!”
Then, setting down his glass and still standing, he pressed his palms against his sides, lifted up his chest, and asked, “Now where were we?”
“Awaiting the evidence,” said Geoffrey slily.
“Ha, you scientists,” said Mr. Blair, wagging a finger. “It's not evidence you want of second sight: it's the fun of knocking it into a cocked hat.”
There was a burst of laughter at this unexpected sally and Mr. Blair sat down, happy as a schoolboy to have brought ease and mirth to his guests. It was his experience that there is nothing like a “subject for discussion” to keep guests reasonably animatedâthe possibilities of variation in subjects and guests being, of course, infinite.
“Now would it be too much for me to ask you to assume”, he said, addressing Geoffrey politely and pointing to the coal scuttle, “that this is the cocked hat?”
“I think so,” said Geoffrey. “It's a bit too full to hold all the rubbish.” And he laughed loudly.
“You frankly don't believe it?” asked Colonel Brown, with his guarded humour.
“No,” replied Geoffrey. “Do you?”
“I am inclined on the whole to say yes. The evidence regarding prevision is pretty mixed, but there is evidence. It is not perhaps conclusive evidence, but still it is evidence. And mathematically once you admit dimensions beyond the third, the thing does at least appear to be feasible.”
“I see,” said Geoffrey, with the smile that implied he had heard that sort of reasoning before. “But I am inclined to be impressed only by evidence. We can say, of course, that anything is possible. That may be an inspiration to the scientist, but it is hardly anything more.”
Colonel Brown smiled and nodded. “You are quite right. But still we have got to work with the tools we have. Like you, I prefer physics to metaphysics. But the possibility of the existence of second sight in no way interferes with physics. It is an interesting speculation scientifically because of the existence of certain evidence and of our power to bring mathematics to bear upon it.”
“What form does this evidence take?” Geoffrey asked.
“Several forms. There is the evidence of what certain thinkers can do in the East; there is the evidence, never properly sifted, of second sight in the Highlandsâand elsewhere; there is the recorded evidence of dreams, in which future incidents are foreseen; there is a tremendous body of miscellaneous evidence, dealt with by the Psychical Research Society and other groups or individuals. The persistence of the idea, together with these manifestations, is also something.”
“Yoga, serialism, and all that. Quite.” Geoffrey smiled sceptically. “As for the origin and persistence of the idea, any sound anthropologist can deal with it adequately and satisfactorily. Take something similar, like water-divining. It has had for itself an almost equal persistence and belief. In fact, the Government of India recently employed one of our most famous diviners, Major Pogson, to find drinking water in certain Indian villages. He divined one hundred and twenty-four villages and was successful in locating drinking sites for one hundred and two of them. That seemed good enough working evidence. Yet under laboratory tests in Cambridge, he failed.”
“That is very interesting,” replied Colonel Brown, “but hardly analogous. For example, if we took the diviner out over Farquhar's croft, he might divine water at a certain spot. We dig and find water. But if we dug at a dozen other spots we might also find water. We don't knowâand could not know without digging the whole place up. That the diviner is extremely skilled in finding water is obvious from his results. But that skill
might
come from a fine co-ordination of the senses under a good geological eye. Much as a man has a good eye for a horse or for aâwell, for something equally fastâor an unusual ear for music.
“There is another kind of evidence, however, in which one single instance proves a whole belief or hypothesis to be valid. Take Ross and his mosquitoes. Ross got the belief that mosquitoes carried the malaria germ. So back he went to India and began dissecting mosquitoes. Out of hundreds of species he first of all had to find the right species. The authorities were against him. The microscopic study of bacteria was regarded as a new fad. Authoritative opinion is very often against the pioneer. It was August and the weather was stifling. Ross had dissected in the course of time about a thousand mosquitoes. The mere dissection of each mosquito took at least two hours. Imagine the colossal labour; the amount of belief necessary to carry on; and nothing but failure a thousand times over. Then one day, the sweat running into his eyes, a crack in the eye-piece of his microscope, his sight badly strained, he is just about to give up work, when he sees the incriminating dark stain, and in that moment his whole case was established and humanity became his debtor for a supremely important scientific discovery.
“Similarly about this prevision. If I could assert, as the result of what I may call a vision, that something was going to happen to you in the future, involving factors of which I could demonstrably have no previous knowledge, and if such happening did take place, then I should be expressing a knowledge acquired otherwise than by means of my five senses. And such knowledge, whether we elected to call it second sight, clairvoyance, or any other name, would be a
fact
, calling, of course, for scientific investigation and, if possible, explanation. But that again, as Dean Cameron says, would require that the scientist investigating the fact, was, in fact, competent to assess it.”
“You desiderate some special kind of scientist?”
Geoffrey's sarcasm was not lost on Colonel Brown, but he appeared to enjoy it rather than otherwise. “Well, I merely mean that a man, let us say, who is exclusively a chemist, would hardly be the right kindââ”
“Hah-haw!” observed George, and amid the general merriment Colonel Brown looked blank, until, glancing at Geoffrey, he realised that he must have put his foot in it.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sure I had no idea that I was intruding upon a real chemist,” and was forced to laugh himself.
“It's all right,” said Geoffrey, smiling, but flushed a trifle.
“It's the more absurd”, said Colonel Brown, “because obviously you and I, trained to the scientific attitude, should be in league against the metaphysicians.”
“But actually,” said the Dean, “is it not true that practically everyone is on Mr. Smith's side? That there is an instinctive desire
not
to believe in second sight? That it arouses antipathy and fear? It is the unknown, and the unknown we dread. And when anyone can show that it is untrue, we are in our hearts relieved?”
By the nature of the silence that followed it would seem that this expressed a general truth.
Mr. Blair turned to Geoffrey. “How would you set about showing it was untrue?”
“Well, it seems to me simple enough,” Geoffrey replied. “Second sight, like any other illusion or delusion, is due entirely to the mechanical condition of the brain. It results from certain physiological adjustments or maladjustments. It has no more to do with time or eternity than, may I say, an eructation produced by an internal stomachic condition. I would make the suggestion that currents of nervous energy get short-circuited in a temporary derangement or muddle of the brain paths along which they usually travel, and you get a spark at the wrong place. That's about all.
“Now consider. If you don't accept that, where are you? If the manifestation we call second sight is not the spontaneous product of the mechanical functioning of the brain, then it must be induced by some power or animus or spirit independent of the grey matter. An arbitrary and miraculous interference by an over-soul or something like that. Once you admit that special kind of interference where are we, and, in particular, where is science? And, in any case, why do it, why call in an hypothesis based on miracle, when we know that a mechanical interpretation can explain it all? Surgeons and psycho-analysts deal successfully with deranged brains in vast quantities daily. Economy is an important word for a scientist, and he has even made a scientific law called the Economy of Hypothesis.”
Geoffrey had been speaking so forcefully that he wiped his mouth. Then he smiled and drank off his wine.
“Excellent,” said Mr. Blair, filling up Geoffrey's glass. “To tell the real truth, that rather tallies with my own severely classical attitude. Could you also do a service to my mind on this matter of dreams? Who is the gentleman, againâMr. Dunne?”
“As far as I have been able to gather,” said Geoffrey, “a dream is quite an irrational performance. It may be good in parts, like the curate's egg, for those who are looking for marvels, but surely it hardly provides a basis on which to build a real scientific edifice.”
“I think you are quite brilliant to-night, Geoffrey,” said Lady Marway, with a friendly smile.
George asked if he might lead the cheers at the dispersal of the mist. There was laughter and cigarette-smoking and some more wine. Then Joyce said nonchalantly, “You have really got to get lost in the mist to appreciate decent headlights.” And was a little surprised, and secretly deeply flattered, at the reception her words got, for she had been thinking simply of her own experience. Long discussions usually bored her to tears. She now looked very animated.
The focus of attention had shifted from Geoffrey to Colonel Brown, who, before he drank, said with a smile, “I am inclined to be impressed only by evidence.”
“Ha! ha! and so we come back to where we started from. Which is doubtless”, said Mr. Blair to Marjory, “what you would expect?”
“You don't subscribe altogether to Mr. Smith's mechanistic theory?” the Dean asked Colonel Brown.
“I'm afraid not. In so far as it does not cover all the facts, it must be unsatisfactory. For example, I happened to mention the word serialism, and clearly Mr. Smith was not impressed, any more than he was by Mr. Dunne's dreams, wherein it is made to appear that Mr. Dunne foresaw the happening of certain events. Now Mr. Dunne is an army man like myself, obviously an able mathematician, and his attitude is selfevidently scientific. He is not concerned about inducing mystical states. He is a frank inquirer who takes you step by step in a very practical and logical and even humorous way. Just let us look for a moment at an instance of the sort of thing he presents in his
An Experiment with Time
. He had a dream, involving an argument with a waiter as to whether it was halfpast four in the morning or in the afternoon. On looking at his watch in the dream he found that it had stopped at half-past four. He awoke, lit a match, hunted for his watch, found it on a chest of drawers, and discovered it was stopped at half-past fourâand subsequently proved that it must have stopped just before he got out of bed, that is, at the actual moment of the dream. Thinking about this experience one morning later on in Sorrento, he wondered if it were possible for him to tell the time on his watch at that particular moment. He shut his eyes and concentrated, got into a half-doze, and presently the watch appeared in front of him, surrounded by a sort of white mist. The vision was binocular, upright, about a foot from his nose, and lit by ordinary daylight. The hour hand stood at eight o'clock. The minute hand swung between twelve and one. Dividing the arc of the swing, he decided that the time was two and a half minutes past eight. Having so decided, he opened his eyes, reached out under the mosquito curtains, got hold of his watch, pulled it in, held it up before himâand saw that the time on the watch was precisely two and a half minutes past eight.”
“That sounds marvellous,” said Lady Marway. “But what sort of relation has it to second sight?”
“Well, it would appear that he had had second sight or prevision of himself looking at his watch. The white mist was the mosquito netting outside the focus of attention. He had foreseen himself doing something before he had actually done it.”
“And how does he account for it?”
“Ah, that's a long argument. Only he does attempt to account for it, not at all on the basis of miracle, but on a basis of mathematics and the existence of dimensions beyond the third. Now mathematics is the sort of thing that we all are prepared to pin our faith to. The absolutely pure science. Yet mathematics constantly deals with what should be to usâand areâquite fantastically imaginary things like, say, the square root of
minus
one. Consider, for example, such a simple thing as this: unless you can add something to less than nothing to make it equal to nothing, there would be no algebra. Do you remember the old school difficulty of trying to understand how two
minuses
make a
plus
? Mathematics also deals confidently with what are to us even more difficult to imagine, namely, dimensions beyond the third. Yet mathematics gets its marvellously valid and indisputable results.”
“I wish I could understand the fourth dimension,” said Helen.
To the smiling faces, Colonel Brown shook his head. “That is difficult. We can't make a mental picture of the fourth dimension, as we can of the first, second, and third dimensions. Just as we can't make a mental picture of a minus quantity. We can only sort of hint at it. The first dimension, as you know, is a straight line, without any breadth or thickness, just a pure line. The second is a surface, having length and breadth but no thickness. The third has length, breadth, and thicknessâlike all of us in this room, and of course like the room itself. Our physical world is entirely three-dimensional. Now try to imagine that this white square of linenâlet me unpin it and spread it on the floorâis two-dimensional only. That is, it is a surface, with no depth. Now imagine an equally flat living creature, a two-dimensional bug, let us say. This then would be its whole world, its universe. It could not conceive, could not picture, anything outside it. But I, moving in three dimensions, can bend down and lift it off its world up onto another world. This action of mine would be to it a pure miracle. But to usâwe merely smile. It's a common illustration. Do you get it at all?”
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