south, toward the new home of Moulay ben Belgasem, his friend. There is a saying among men who know the Barbary coast of Africa, "Weep for the Arab who changes his coat." I thought of that, and I laughed it away with the triumph of the child of the Light that is in the West. As the figure of Younez disappeared into the deeper mists of West Broadway, I gazed around me at the great city of the dawn and I said aloud: "The God of the man who talks five thousand miles is awake. Allah sleeps!" In the close air of the bedchamber the "tick" of the "installment" alarm clock continued sharp and insistent in Moulay's ear. It was like water boring drop by drop into his brain. Finally he opened his eyes. Under the window shade there was the faintest line of gray light. He closed his eyes again. But he could not shut out the "tick, tick, tick" of the clock. He opened his eyes again, took a deep breath into his lungs, and slid out of bed. The head on the other pillow lifted, tousled and half awake. via Gibralter and Algiers. He replaced it in his pocket, took up a canvas suitcase, packed and hidden between the commode and the wall, and, turning his back on the bed and the sleeper, went on tiptoe out of the room. In the outer hall the stairs were dark. It was on the second flight down that they began to seem long. The bag in his hand grew heavy. On the last flight it became so heavy that he had to pause for a moment and set it down. A singular weakness invaded all his muscles. His lungs contracted. The blood pounded in his ears, so that the whole stair well seemed to resonate like the interior of a drum. After a moment that was gone. The strength came back to his muscles and breathing was easy again. He took up the bag, completed the descent of the stairs, and opened the street door for a few inches without any sound, letting in a streak of the mist-gray light of the morning. Then for a space of perhaps two minutes he waited, standing as he was, with his left hand on the knob, motionless save for the pupils of his eyes. The moment of physical perturbation "What you doing? Where you going had passed. Now it was the turn of to?" "Nowheres." Moulay lay back again on the bed and remained motionless. When the other's breathing had taken on once more the slow, measured rise and fall of the sleeper he began to edge himself over the bedside inch by inch. Once on the floor he set about dressing himself. He desisted bathing his hands and face in the washbowl, taking the utmost care against the drip of water, he got down on the carpet, prostrated himself with his face to the east, and prayed briefly. Then he finished dressing. After he had put on his chechia he felt in his coat pocket to make sure that the paper he needed was there. He even took it out and examined it in the thin filtration of light under the shade. It was a thirdclass ticket good for passage on the steamship Tuscany, sailing for Naples the mental. His brain took panic. His brain begged his hand to close the door. But his hand did not obey. After a few seconds that too was gone, leaving his faculties abnormally tranquil and keen. As he peered into the street the first thing to take his attention was an empty rubbish can standing in the gutter directly before the door. Had it been there the night before? His memory engaged deliberately with that problem. His memory had the story of the desert tumbleweed which his father, Belgasem, had brought up from the dry river to give him shelter before M'barek's tent. A rubbish can would do for that where there were no desert tumbleweeds. Had it been there the night before? Yes? No? No, he could not remember that it had. ... His right hand went back to his hip pocket, drew out quietly the revolver he had bought the day before in Third Avenue, and raised it to the level of his eye. He aimed at the top of the can. He was quite cool. His hand trembled a little; he dropped it for a moment to give it blood and tried again. He aimed this time at the middle of the can. Now he was interrupted and a little startled by a sound coming from another quarter. There was a light sound of feet. He put his eyes swiftly to the plane of the door and peered along the street toward the right. He saw the figure of Younez advancing upon him in the faulty light. "Hallouf ben hallouf!" he breathed, and his heart sang. "Son of a pig, son of the swine litter of the Ouled Zab. To think, then, that thou couldst come for reprisal on the head of a Beni Khmaïs in such way, walking without a stick to cover thy hide!" And swinging the door open, he fired swiftly and he fired straight. He picked up the bag and walked down the steps. There he stood for ten seconds, watching the obscure huddle on the sidewalk. When it did not move at the end of that time he spat on the barrel of the revolver, blew out the smoke, and flung the thing over a neighboring wall. There began to be an alarm of voices and feet. He stepped into the areaway, walked to the rear of the building, vaulted quietly over a wooden fence and came into an alley that led straight. There is a very old proverb in the Arabic, "He that hideth his secret attaineth his end." SCIENCE AND RELIGION BY CHARLES P. STEINMETZ INTRODUCTION THE problem of religion-that is, of the relations of man with the supernatural, with God and immortality, with the soul, our personality or the ego, and its existence or nonexistence after death—is the greatest and deepest which ever confronted mankind. In the present state of human knowledge, science can give no definite and final conclusions on these subjects, due to the limitations inherent in science. We must realize that all our knowledge and information and the entire structure of science are ultimately derived from the perceptions of our senses and thereby limited in the same manner and to the same extent as our sense perceptions and our intellect are limited. The success or failure of scientific achievement largely depends on the extent to which we can abstract—that is, make our observations and conclusions independent of the limitations of the human mind. But there are limitations inherent in the human mind beyond which our intellect cannot reach, and therefore science does not and cannot show us the world as it actually is, with its true facts and laws, but only as it appears to us within the inherent limitations of the human mind. The greatest limitation of the human mind is that all its perceptions are finite, and our intellect cannot grasp the conception of infinity. The same limitation therefore applies to the world as it appears to our reasoning intellect, and in the world of science there is no infinity, and conceptions such as God, the immortality of the ego, etc., are beyond the realm of empirical science. Science deals only with finite events in finite time and space, and the farther we pass onward in space or time, the more uncertain becomes the scientific reasoning, until, in trying to approach the infinite, we are lost in the fog of unreasonable contradiction, "beyond science"-that is, "transcendental." Thus, we may never know and understand the infinite, whether in nature, in the ultimate deductions from the laws of nature in time and in space, or beyond nature, on such transcendental conceptions as God, immortality, etc. But we may approach these subjects as far as the limitations of our mind permit, reach the border line beyond which we cannot go, and so derive some understanding of how far these subjects may appear nonexisting or unreasonable, merely because they are beyond the limitations of our intellect. There appear to me two promising directions of approach-first, from the complex of thought and research, which in physics has culminated in the theory of relativity; and, second, in a study of the gaps found in the structure of empirical science and what they may teach us. ALL events of nature occur in space and in time. Whatever we perceive, whatever record we receive through our senses, always is attached to, and contained in, space and time. But are space and time real existing things? Have they an absolute reality outside of our mind, as a part or framework of nature, as entities that is, things that are? Or are they merely a conception of the human mind, a form given by the character of our mind to the events of nature —that is, to the hypothetical cause of our sense perceptions? Kant, the greatest and most critical of all philosophers, in his Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der Reinen Vernunft), concludes that space and time have no absolute existence, but are categories-that is, forms in which the human mind conceives his relation to nature. The same idea is expressed by the poet - philosopher Goethe in his dramatic autobiography Faust (in the second part), when he refers to the "Mütter," to the marriage of Achilles and Helena "outside of all time." It is found in ancient time. So Revelation speaks of "there should be time no longer” (ὅτι χρόνος οὐκέτι ἔσται). The work of the great mathematicians of the nineteenth century-Gauss, Riemann, Lobatschefsky, Bolyai-offered further evidence that space is not an empirical deduction from nature, but a conception of the mind, by showing that various forms of space can be conceived, differing from one another and from the form in which the mind has cast the events of nature (the “Euclidean" space). Finally, physical science, in the theory of relativity, has deduced the same conclusions: space and time do not exist in nature by themselves, as empty space and empty time, but their existence is only due to things and events as they occur in nature. They are relative in the relation between us and the events of nature, so much so that they are not fixed and invariable in their properties, but depend upon the observer and the conditions of observation. We can get an idea of how utterly our perception of nature depends on the particular form of our time conception by picturing to ourselves how nature would look if our time perception were 100,000 times faster, or 100,000 times slower. In the first case, with our sense perceptions 100,000 times faster, all events in nature would appear to us 100,000 times slower. This would then be a stationary and immovable world. The only motion which we could see with our eyes would be that of the cannon ball, which would crawl slowly along, at less than a snail's pace. The express train going at sixty miles per hour would appear to stand still, and deliberate experiment be required to discover its motion. By noting its position on the track, and noting it again after a period of time as long as five minutes appears to us now, we should find its position changed by three inches. It would be a dangerous world, as there would be many objects-not distinguishable to the senses from other harmless objectscontact with which would be dangerous, even fatal; and one and the same object (as the express train) might sometimes be harmless (when at rest) sometimes dangerous (when in motion), without our senses being able to see any difference. On the other hand, with our sense perceptions 100,000 times slower, all events in nature would appear to us to occur 100,000 times faster. There would be little rest in nature, and we should see plants, and even stones, move. We should observe, in a period of time not longer than a minute or two appear to us now, a plant start from seed, grow up, flower, bring fruit, and die. Sun and moon would be luminous bands traversing the sky; day and night alternate seconds of light and darkness. Much of VOL. CXLIV.-No. 861.-38 nature, all moving things, would be invisible to us. If I moved my arm, it would disappear, to reappear again when I held it still. It would be a usual occurrence to have somebody suddenly appear and just as suddenly disappear from our midst, or to see only a part of a body. The vanishing and the appearance of objects would be common occurrences in nature; and we should speak of ishing" and "appearing," instead of "moving" and "stopping." Collisions, usually harmless, with invisible objects would be common occurrences. 66 van As seen, nature and its laws would appear to us very different from what we find them now, with our present time perception. Thus philosophy, mathematics, and physical science agree that space and time cannot be entities, but are conceptions of the human mind in its relation to nature. But what does this mean, and what conclusions follow herefrom? The space of our conception is threedimensional—that is, extended in three directions. For instance, the northsouth direction, the east-west direction, and the up-down direction. Any place or "point" in space thus is located, relative to some other point, by giving its three distances from the latter, in three (arbitrarily chosen) directions. Time has only one dimension—that is, extends in one direction only, from the past to the future and a moment or "point" in time thus is located, with reference to another point in time, by one time distance. But there is a fundamental difference between our space conception and our time conception, in that we can pass through time only in one direction, from the past to the future, while we can pass through space in any direction, from north to south, as well as from south to north-that is, time is irreversible, flows uniformly in one direction, while space is reversible, can be traversed in any direction. This means that when we enter a thing in space, as a house, we can approach it, pass through it, leave it, come back to it, and the thing therefore appears permanent to us, and we know, even when we have left the house and do not see it any more, that it still exists, and that we can go back to it again and enter it. Not so with time. When approaching a thing in time, an event such as a human life, it extends from a point in time-birth-over a length of time-the life-to an end point in time death-just as the house in space extends from a point in space-say the north wall-over a length of space-its extent to an end point in space-say the south wall. But when we pass beyond the end point of an event in time the death of a life-we cannot go back to the event any more; the event has ceased, ended, the life is extinct. But let us imagine that the same irreversibility applied to the conception of space-that is, that we could move through space only from north to south, and not in the opposite direction. Then a thing in space, as a house, would not exist for us until we approached it. When approaching it, it would first appear indistinctly, and more and more distinctly the nearer we approached it, just as an event in time does not exist until we reach the time point of its beginning, but may appear in anticipation, in time perspective, when we approach it, the more distinctly, the closer we approach it, until we reach the threshold of the time span covered by the event, and the event begins to exist, the life is born. So to us, if we could move only from north to south, the house would begin to exist only when we reached. its north door. That point would be the "birth" of the house. Passing through the span of space covered by the house, this would for us be its existence, its "life," and when we stepped out of the south door the house would cease to exist for us, we could never enter it and turn back to it again-that is, it would be dead and extinct, just as the life when we pass beyond its end point in time. Thus birth and death, appearance and extinction of an event in time, as our life, are the same as the beginning and end point of a thing in space, like a house. But the house appears to us to exist permanently, whether we are in it, within the length between beginning and end point, or not, while the event in time, our life, appears to us to exist only during the length of time when we are between its beginning and its end point in time, and before and after, it does not exist for us, because we cannot go back to it or ahead into it. But assume time were reversible, like spacethat is, we could go through it in any direction. There would then be no such thing as birth or origin, and death or extinction, but our life would exist permanently, as a part or span of time, just as the house exists as a part or section of space, and the question of immortality, of extinction or nonextinction by death, would then be meaningless. We should not exist outside of the span of time covered by our life, just as we do not exist outside of the part of space covered by our body in space, and to reach an event, as our life, we should have to go to the part of space and to the part of time where it occurs; but there would be no more extinction of the life by going beyond its length in time as there is extinction of a house by going outside of its door, and everything, like a human being, would have four extensions or dimensions-three extensions in space and one in time.1 If space and time, and therefore the characteristics of space and time, are not real things or entities, but conceptions of the human mind, then those transcendental questions, as that of immortality after death and existence before birth, are not problems of fact in nature or outside of nature, but are meaningless, just as the question whether a house exists for an observer outside of the space It is interesting to note that the relativity theory leads to the conception of a symmetrical four-dimensional world space (Minkowski), in which in general each of the four dimensions comprises space and time conceptions, and the segregation into three dimensions of space and one dimension of time occurs only under special conditions of observation. |