Four-Dimensional Vistas | Page 2

a flying man so little amaze us? Because we know about engines, and the smell of gasoline has dulled our sense of the sublime. The living voice of a dead man leaves us unterrified if only we can be sure that it comes from a phonograph; but let that voice speak to us out of vacancy and we fall a prey to the same order of alarm that is felt by a savage at the report of a gun that he has never seen.
This illustration very well defines the nature of a miracle: it is a manifestation of power new to experience, and counter to the current thought of the time, Miracles are therefore always in order, they always happen. It is nothing that the sober facts of to-day are more marvellous than the fictions of Baron Munchausen, so long as we understand them: it is everything that phenomena are multiplying, that we are unable to understand. This increasing pressure upon consciousness from a new direction has created a need to found belief on something firmer than a bottomless gullibility of mind. This book is aimed to meet that need by giving the mind the freedom of new spaces; but before it can even begin to do so, the reader must be brought to see the fallacy of attempting to measure the limits of the possible by that faculty known as common sense. And by common sense is meant, not the appeal to abstract reason, but to concrete experience.
THE FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE
Common sense had scarce had its laugh at Bell, and its shout of "I told you so!" at poor Langley, when lo! the telephone became the world's nervous system, and aeroplanes began to multiply like summer flies. To common sense the alchemist's dream of transmuting lead into gold seems preposterous, yet in a hundred laboratories radium is breaking down into helium, and the new chemistry bids fair to turn the time-honored jeer at the alchemists completely upside down. A wife whose mind was oriented in the new direction effectually silenced her husband's ridicule of what he called her credulity by reminding him that when wireless telegraphy was first suggested he had exclaimed, "Ah, that, you know, is one of the things that is not possible!" He was betrayed by his common sense.
The lessons such things teach us are summed up in the reply of Arago, the great savant, to the wife of Daguerre. She asked him if he thought her husband was losing his mind because he was trying to make permanent the image in a mirror. Arago is said to have answered, "He who, outside of pure mathematics, says a thing is impossible, speaks without reason."
Common sense neither leads nor lags, but is ever limited to the passing moment: the common knowledge of to-day was the mystery and enchantment of the day before yesterday, and will be the mere commonplace of the day after to-morrow. If common sense can so little anticipate the ordinary and orderly advancement of human knowledge, it is still less able to take that leap into the dark which is demanded of it now. The course of wisdom is therefore to place reliance upon reason and intuition, leaving to common sense the task of guiding the routine affairs of life, and guiding these alone.
THE FUNCTION OF SCIENCE
In enlisting the aid of reason in our quest for freedom, we shall be following in the footsteps of mathematicians and theoretical physicists. In their arduous and unflinching search after truth they have attained to a conception of the background of phenomena of far greater breadth and grandeur than that of the average religionist of to-day. As a mathematician once remarked to a neo-theosophist, "Your idea of the ether is a more material one than the materialist's own." Science has, however, imposed upon itself its own limitations, and in this connection these should be clearly understood.
Science is that knowledge which can be gained by exact observation and correct thinking. If science makes use of any methods but these it ceases to be itself. Science has therefore nothing to do with morals: it gives the suicide his pistol, the surgeon his life-saving lance, but neither admonishes nor judges them. It has nothing to do with emotion: it exposes the chemistry of a tear, the mechanism of laughter; but of sorrow and happiness it has naught to say. It has nothing to do with beauty: it traces the movements of the stars, and tells of their constitution; but the fact of their singing together, and that "such harmony is in immortal souls," it leaves to poet and philosopher. The timbre, loudness, pitch, of musical tones, is a concern of science; but for this a Beethoven symphony is no better than the latest ragtime air from the music halls. In