Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society. Bill Bryson

are not the only ones who might be troubled by this development. Secularists can be concerned too, for the equation of physical space with the totality of ‘reality’ also problematises the idea of a human self. What does it mean to say that the self exists if we cannot locate it on a map? In talks I give about this subject I am sometimes asked during question time to ‘prove that the self exists’. It is always a young man who makes this demand and he is usually a student of physics or philosophy. He is well read and he means his question in earnest. He does not believe that the self exists and he wants me to prove it does. At first I was puzzled by this demand, then I realised how I should answer: If the self does not exist, I say, then his self doesn’t, so I shall move right along to a question from someone who does. I assume there are some selves in the room who do exist.

      But are there? In the mathematically defined space of modern cosmology do any of us exist?

      A SCIENCE OF MIND

      In the early eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke claimed that it wasn’t stable for a society to have only a science of body. According to Locke, we would eventually need to develop a complementary science of mind, which is what Freud attempted in the late nineteenth century. The psychoanalytic tradition of the past century may be read, in part, as one

      Portrait of John Locke, after Sir Godfrey Kneller.

      reaction to the cosmological shift that took place two hundred years earlier. Freudian psychoanalytics and its many descendants are attempts to make sense of the self in a non-spatial framework and in a very real way to get beyond the metaphysical dualism of our Christian and Greek heritage. Personally I find myself greatly in sympathy with the whole exercise and although I think its therapeutic effects are easily overstated, I do believe the psychoanalytic stream of theory and practice is a powerful response to what remains within our society a cosmologically inspired trauma.

      I do not mean to propose here that every individual is personally feeling this rent; but it is clear that a great many of us are. For all of the immense practical and epistemic triumphs of modern scientific metaphysics, which is premised on a homogeneous continuous conception of space, it is manifestly not being accepted by huge slabs of our population. Reactions against it have been vast and varied from Blake’s and Keat’s scathing poetic critiques (that science would ‘conquer by rule and line’, ‘unweave the rainbow’ and so on), to Alfred Whitehead’s enigmatically difficult ‘process philosophy’, which attempts to articulate a reality in which neither matter nor mind take precedence, rather both are artefacts of a fundamentally procedural world. Intellectual alternatives to pure physicalism are myriad: Teilhard de Chardin, Loren Eiseley, Mircea Eliade and Rupert Sheldrake may all be read as responses, to say nothing of the exponentially expanding volume of New Age literature. To the continuing horror of many champions of science, belief in astral planes, psychic channelling, reincarnation and past lives seems to be growing stronger.

      In part I believe what this represents is a widespread social refusal of spatial monism. Whole sectors of our society are just not buying it! More than twenty million people bought The Celestine Prophecy (it is one of the most successful books of all time), which posits that when we become the beings we ought to be our souls ‘cross over’ (via some processes of quantum mechanics) to a higher spatial plane. In the age of science, one of the most pervasive fantasies is indeed the existence of other spaces of being: from the X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Lost and Battlestar Galactica, our television screens offer a steady diet of realities in which multiple spaces and planes of being co-exist. (Cyberfiction offers yet another response – the fantasy of downloading one’s mind into a computer to live for ever in a virtual world is nothing more, though a good deal less, than a technological version of Heaven.) One of the great philosophical projects of the post-Enlightenment era has been to articulate non-spatialised conceptions of the self in relation to the cosmos; yet judging by the evidence of the most pervasive medium on our planet the enterprise has met with little success in a sociological sense. Even science fiction writers – Carl Sagan, no less – keep on inventing wormholes through the physio-spatial matrix to other, suspiciously spiritualised, places of being.

      Those of us who love science may choose to interpret all this as a kind of play, and in some sense it is, but the refusal to accept spatial monism is also in part fuelling the rise of Creationism and other fundamentalist brands of Christianity. At the same time that spatial monism erased the division between earthly and heavenly space, it also provided a platform for erasing any fundamental distinction between living and non-living things. In the new era of science, continuity itself became the epistemic model – the continuity of the laws of nature, the continuity of space, the continuity of matter, the continuity of life. No body is special, because no thing is special, because no place is special. Humans are related to apes because, in the end, we are all just inert matter floating in a homogeneous void. The fundamentalist rebellion against Darwinism is not just a rejection of the continuity proposed by biology but in a wider, and less obvious way a rejection of the very premise of totalised cosmic continuity. Christians who insist on a space for the soul wish to reclaim that part of the medieval world picture that literally gave a place to moral human agents. Though I do not endorse their specific responses, I believe that in this respect the religious right point us to a deep and abiding sociological problem that will not be easily resolved and which ought not be so readily dismissed.

      CONCLUSION

      At all times in The Divine Comedy Dante knew where he was. He was embedded in a cosmos that gave him a position physically, spiritually and psychologically. One of the many strengths of the Comedy is that it gives a concrete landscape to both soul and psyche. While the book must be read as the journey of a Christian soul through Hell and Purgation towards Paradise, it can also be read as a journey of psychological self-examination and healing. The descent into Hell is a literal depiction of human psychic suffering; the trip up Mount Purgatory is the therapeutic path. We can gauge Dante’s progress by the state of his surroundings – we feel the anguish as we slog with him through the ditches of the Malebolge, we rejoice with relief as he trots up the marble ramps of the mountain. Dante may be a sinner, but he is never lost – his cosmos tells him in the very texture of his surroundings where he stands as a material body, as a Christian soul and as a human self.

      Several years ago I gave a lecture at a small university in the American South. After the lecture I was taken aside by a professor at the school, an anthropologist who had done field work in Namibia with the Himba tribe. One day, he told me, he was approached by a Himba man who asked him a question: ‘Do you Westerners really see the space between you as empty?’ ‘Yes,’ my American interlocutor replied, ‘that is the way our science tells us to see the world.’ The Himba man went on to explain that, in his culture, people saw the world in a different way. According to their worldview, each person is surrounded by a kind of self-space which extends out around the individual. Going about their daily business, he and his fellow villagers found their self-spaces continually intersecting. They rarely found themselves ‘alone’ – their ‘selves’ being continually in touch with others. Having explained this way of seeing, the Namibian man asked the American professor a second question: ‘If you people really see yourselves as isolated points alone in empty space, how do you bear it?’

      It seems to me that as a society we are not bearing it. Unlike Dante, we are lost in space.

       4 NEAL STEPHENSON

      ATOMS OF COGNITION: METAPHYSICS IN THE ROYAL SOCIETY, 1715-2010

      Neal Stephenson is the author of the three-volume historical epic The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World) and the novels Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington. His latest novel is the alternate reality epic Anathem.

      THE