This state of affairs had its beginning at the time when the study and the control of certain psychic influences descended, if it may be so expressed, into the profane domain, and this in a certain sense marks the beginning of the phase of ‘dissolution’ properly so called in the modern deviation. This time can broadly speaking be placed as far back as the eighteenth century, so that it is seen to be exactly contemporary with materialism itself, showing clearly that these two things, contraries in appearance only, had in fact to appear together; it does not seem that anything of the kind was in evidence at any earlier date, no doubt because the deviation had not then attained the stage of development that could make such a thing possible. The chief characteristic of the scientific ‘mythology’ of that period was the conception of ‘fluids’ of different kinds, all physical forces being imagined to exist in some such form; it is precisely this conception that was carried over from the corporeal order into the subtle order in the theory of ‘animal magnetism’. If this is related back to the idea of the ‘solidification’ of the world, it might perhaps be thought that a ‘fluid’ is by definition the opposite of a ‘solid’; but it is nonetheless true that in this case both play exactly the same part, because the conception of ‘fluids’ has the effect of ‘embodying’ things that really belong to subtle manifestation. The magnetizers were in a sense the direct precursors of ‘neo-spiritualism’, if indeed they were not really its first representatives; their theories and their practices influenced to a greater or lesser extent all the schools that came into being later, whether they were openly profane, like spiritualism, or whether they had pseudo-initiatic pretensions, like the many varieties of occultism. This persistent influence is all the more strange in that it seems quite disproportionate to the importance of the psychic phenomena, very elementary as they were, which constituted the field of experiment in magnetism; but perhaps even more astonishing is the part played by this same magnetism, right from the time of its first appearance, in turning aside from all serious work initiatic organizations that had still retained up to that time, if not a very far-reaching effective knowledge, at least an awareness of what they had lost in this respect and the will to do their best to recover it. It is permissible to suppose that this is not the least of the reasons for which magnetism was ‘launched’ at the appointed time, even though, as almost always happens in similar cases, its apparent promoters were acting only as more or less unconscious instruments.
The ‘fluidic’ conception survived in the common mentality, though not in the theories of physicists, at least up to about the middle of the nineteenth century (though expressions such as ‘electric fluid’ continued to be used for even longer, but more in a mechanical way and without a precise imagery any longer being attached to them); spiritualism, which came to birth at that period, inherited the conception all the more naturally through being predisposed to it by an original connection with magnetism; and this connection is much closer than might be at first supposed, for it is highly probable that spiritualism could never have reached any very considerable development but for the divagations of the somnambulists, and also that it was the existence of magnetic ‘subjects’ which prepared for and made possible the existence of spiritualist ‘mediums’. Even today most magnetizers and spiritualists continue to talk of ‘fluids’, and what is more, to believe seriously in them; this ‘anachronism’ is all the more strange in that these people are in general fanatical partisans of ‘progress’; such an attitude fits in badly with a conception that has for a long time been excluded from the scientific domain and so ought in their eyes to appear very ‘backward’. In the present-day mythology, ‘fluids’ have been replaced by ‘waves’ and ‘radiations’, these last in their turn of course effectively playing the part of ‘fluids’ in the theories most recently invented to try to explain the action of certain subtle influences; it should suffice to mention ‘radiaesthesia’ which is as ‘typical’ as possible in this respect. Needless to say, if it were only a question in all these affairs of mere images, of comparisons based on some analogy (and not on identity) with phenomena in the sensible order, the matter would not have very serious consequences, and might even be justified up to a point; but such is not the case, for the ‘radiaesthesists’ believe very literally that the psychic influences with which they are concerned are ‘waves’ or ‘radiations’ propagated in space in the most ‘corporeal’ manner that it is possible to imagine; moreover, thought itself does not escape from representation in this fashion. Here we find another case of the same ‘materialization’ continuing to assert itself in a new form, perhaps more insidious than that of ‘fluids’ because it may appear to be less crude; nonetheless the whole affair belongs fundamentally to exactly the same order and does no more than express the very limitations that are inherent in the modern mentality and consist in an incapacity to conceive of anything whatsoever outside the domain of the formation of mental images of sensible things.[52]
It is scarcely necessary to add that the ‘clairvoyants’, according to the schools to which they belong, go so far as to see ‘fluids’ or ‘radiations’, just as there are some, particularly among the Theosophists, who see atoms and electrons; here, as in many other matters, what they in fact see are their own mental images, which naturally always fit well with the particular theories they believe in. There are some who see the ‘fourth dimension’, and even other supplementary dimensions of space as well; and this leads to a few words in conclusion on another case that also appertains to ‘scientific mythology’, and might well be called the ‘delirium of the fourth dimension’. It must be agreed that ‘hypergeometry’ seems to have been devised in order to strike the imagination of people who have not enough mathematical knowledge to be aware of the true character of an algebraic construction expressed in geometrical terms, for that is really what ‘hypergeometry’ is; and it may be noted in passing that this is another example of the dangers of ‘popularization’. Moreover, well before the physicists had thought of bringing the ‘fourth dimension’ into their hypotheses (which had already become much more mathematical than really physical, because their character had become both increasingly quantitative and at the same time increasingly ‘conventional’) the ‘psychists’ (they were not yet called ‘metapsychists’ in those days) were already making use of it to explain phenomena in which one solid body appears to pass through another; and here again it was not for them a case of a mere picture ‘illustrating’ in some way what may be called ‘interferences’ between different domains or states, which would have been unobjectionable, but, according to their ideas, the body in question had quite genuinely passed through the ‘fourth dimension’. That was in any case only a beginning, and in recent years, under the influence of the new physics, occultist schools have been observed to go so far as to build up the greater part of their theories on this same conception of a ‘fourth dimension’; it may be noted also in this connection that occultism and modern science tend more and more to join up with one another as the ‘disintegration’ proceeds step by step, because both are traveling toward it by their different paths. The ‘fourth dimension’ will be spoken of again later from a different point of view; but enough has been said about that sort of thing for the present, and the time has come to turn to other considerations more directly related to the question of the ‘solidification’ of the world.
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It is as a result of this same incapacity and of the confusion to which it gives rise that Kant, in the philosophic field, did not hesitate to declare to be ‘inconceivable’ everything that is merely ‘unimaginable’; moreover, speaking more generally, it is the very same limitations that really gave birth to all the varieties of ‘agnosticism’.