Ubiquity

“ What some sages had presumed and concluded by speculation - that what we call room and place is nothing but one of the infinitely numerous ways of perception of our being that neither taken up room nor occupies space, the ego that is neither here nor there - had become for me an ordinary fact, the knowledge of which influenced all my thought. ”

“ Is it that the notion of the immense space, which separates us, unites with our conception, and impresses us, as it were, with the omnipresence of our own intellectual nature,—when we recognize on scenes so remote and in circumstances of society so different, the same thoughts, and doubts, and errors, which have perplexed, and occupied, and delighted ourselves? ”

“ With cubic existence (and its correlative three-dimensional space) , with weight and texture we have therefore got from the contemplated shape to a thought alien to that shape and its contemplation. The thought, to which life and its needs and dangers has given precedence over every other: What Thing is behind this shape, what qualities must be inferred from this aspect? After the possibility of occupying so much space, the most important quality which things can have for our hopes and fears, is the possibility of altering their occupation of space; not our locomotion, but theirs. ”

“ In addition to the private spaces belonging to the private worlds of different percipients, there is, however, another space, in which one whole private world counts as a point, or at least as a spatial unit. ”

“ We have imaged to ourselves a collection of points in space, and that means we see the collection itself, as covering a given area, with other spaces and collections outside of it. Are we to say that the mind is in space? ”

“ Let us suppose a person residing inside a house, and another person looking at the house from the opposite side of the street; you would not be unjust enough to expect the person on the outside to describe minutely its inner chambers and everything that was in it, because he would have to take it on trust from the person who resided inside, but you would take the report of the man living outside as to the exterior of the house. ”

“ This formal activity which operates throughout a series of changes and holds them to a single course; that subordinates their aimless flux to its own perfect manifestation; which, leaping the boundaries of space and time, keeps individuals in spite of their being distant in space and remote in time to a uniform type of structure and function: this principle seemed to give insight into the very nature of reality itself. ”

“ The reality of a dream that persists, or a fantasy which retains its unbelievable qualities but becomes actuality. And in this atmosphere we set up our machines and agencies and extensions of Earth—bursting with the conceits and importance of having conquered space. ”

“ This which is mastered has so thin a space to build it all that there is plenty of room and yet is it quarreling, it is not and the insistence is marked. A change is in a current and there is no habitable exercise. ”

“ One can imagine a city built underwater, or a spherical house that can be rolled from location to location, devices of all kinds, clothing as thin as someone's thought, or as thick as tree bark or a rubber tire. One can imagine the wearable computer, new intelligent materials, even new human beings. ”

“ Each house has its center of human life with life of bird and beast, and the centers were in touch with one another, connected like a row of children linked together by their hands; all together forming one organism, instinct with one life, moved by one mind, like a many-colored serpent lying at rest, extended at full length upon the ground. ”

“ We will emerge from it into some tremendous greater emptiness, some greater space. As much greater as the space of a bedroom interior would be to the head of a pin lying on a bureau! What matter whether we emerge on one side of the pinhead or the other? ”

“ Thus each person, so far as his sense-data are concerned, lives in a private world. This private world contains its own space, or rather spaces, for it would seem that only experience teaches us to correlate the space of sight with the space of touch and with the various other spaces of other senses. ”

“ When we pass out of this room, presently, and touch the great outside world once more, what shall we find? How soon will it be generally known that a section of the community—a larger section, maybe, than we conceive possible—has been silently, suddenly, secretly taken from our midst? ”

“ The middle intellectual region gives us Intuition and Clairvoyance at the inner face of the front lobe, then Consciousness and observation, running into recent and remote Memory, above the region of Phenomena which recognizes the changes in physical objects. Between Time and Invention we have System, lying between Order below and Planning above. ”

“ Thus space furnishes us at once with the diagram of our near future, and, as this future must recede indefinitely, space which symbolizes it has for its property to remain, in its immobility, indefinitely open. ”

“ Complex the system is, and not sum-totally intelligible as yet, though we may, and do, get hints of vision, as one catches through the thick ranks of forest-trees occasional glimpses of sky-line, where room is made by a gash in the ranks of woods, and the open looks in like some one standing outside a window with face toward us. ”

“ So interwoven and complicated are the fibres which form the texture of the highly civilised and artificial community in which we live, that an effect produced on any one point, is instantly transmitted to the most remote and apparently unconnected parts of the system. ”

“ But in all this nothing has been said of the comparative measurement of one sensible space-total against another, or of the way in which, by summing our divers simple sensible space-experiences together, we end by constructing what we regard as the unitary, continuous, and infinite objective Space of the real world. ”

“ The regularity of the building and its parts is partly produced by the direct adaptation of each member to the stability of the whole, partly it serves to facilitate the survey and comprehension of the whole, and finally, regular figures to some extent enhance the beauty because they reveal the constitution of space as such. ”

“ In the mind the various extents maintain no necessarily stubborn order relatively to each other, while [Pg 31] in the physical world they bound each other stably, and, added together, make the great enveloping Unit which we believe in and call real Space. ”

“ Why are these apparently trivial things out of our power? Why do they perpetually evolve other circumstances, till a chain forms itself—a net, a web—as visible, and as tangible, as if it had been actually woven by the three sisters of antique mythology. ”

“ For a like reason we feel a difficulty in mounting, and pass not without a kind of reluctance from the inferior to that which is situated above it; as if our ideas acquired a kind of gravity from their objects. As a proof of this, do we not find, that the facility, which is so much studyed in music and poetry, is called the fail or cadency of the harmony or period; the idea of facility communicating to us that of descent, in the same manner as descent produces a facility? ”

“ The partial community of structure, whereby the two perceptive modes yield immediate demonstration of a common world, arises from their reference of sense-data, common to both, to localizations, diverse or identical, in a spatio-temporal system common to both. ”

“ The satisfaction of his essential being lay in obscurity, in invisibility—in passing, unobserved, through a hidden entrance, into the very central chamber of power, and in sitting there, quietly, pulling the subtle strings that set the wheels of the whole world in motion. ”

“ But this modification of distance we call place, being made by men for their common use, that by it they might be able to design the particular position of things, where they had occasion for such designation ; men consider and determine of this place by reference to those adjacent things which best served to their present purpose, without considering other things which, to another purpose, would better determine the place of the same thing. ”

“ Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. ”

“ We are in the beginning of a new time, with such forces of organization and unification at work in mechanical traction, in the telephone and telegraph, in a whole wonderland of novel, [Pg 225] space-destroying appliances, and in the correlated inevitable advance in practical education, as the world has never felt before. ”

“ So far as the subdivisions of a sense-space are to be measured exactly against each other, objective forms occupying one subdivision must directly or indirectly be superposed upon the other, and the mind must get the immediate feeling of an outstanding plus. ”

“ The lofty circular hall represents the sphere of knowledge it embraces. The Philosopher, the Historian, Theologian, Lawyer, Inventor, and Scientific Mechanic may each find here an almost boundless mine from which he may draw, as cheaply as water, the most valuable deposits of thought, observation, and fact. ”

“ If one asks whether the orbs in space take precedence of personal will and intelligence, or personal will and intelligence take precedence of the orbs in space, one has only to ask whether builders or buildings have priority. ”

“ In the generality of cases the individual of this genus confines himself to the smallest possible amount of room, in which he can possibly carry on his business—the rest of the house he lets off for offices. In this confined space he lives, without taking any adequate exercise, often lying perdu in a dark inner room, through a peep-hole of which he watches for customers. ”

“ But in either case their entrance into the mind is equivalent to a more detailed subdivision, cognizance, and measurement of the space considered. The bringing of subdivisions to consciousness constitutes, then, the entire process by which we pass from our first vague feeling of a total vastness to a cognition of the vastness in detail. The more numerous the subdivisions are, the more elaborate and perfect the cognition becomes. ”

“ For this we must have recourse to relations and orders of existence. Space is therefore to be defined as the order which makes it possible for objects to have situation; time as that which makes it possible for events to have dating,—not as if they were actually prior to them, and although nothings in themselves, yet capable of giving concrete determination to things, but as actually the relations themselves, and as ideally necessary for the coherent experience of co-existent objects and of connected events. ”

“ We must know something of direction in order to conveniently locate the streets, buildings and physiographical features near our home. Finally, we will try to realize the great size of the earth, of which our home is but a small portion, by a consideration of the relationship of our community to the rest of the world and to some of this world’s great diversities. ”

“ And all the satellites of these headquarters worlds are also architectural spheres.
The various headquarters worlds are provided with every phase of material and spiritual creation. All kinds of material, morontial, and spiritual beings are at home on these rendezvous worlds of the universes. As mortal creatures ascend the universe, passing from the material to the spiritual realms, they never lose their appreciation for, and enjoyment of, their former levels of existence. ”

“ Any conceit that I previously had on account of the large structures of my own world quickly vanished at the sight of this imposing edifice. During my visit the winged workers were laboring on the upper stories and I watched them with great wonderment as they descended from the clouds to carry materials to the higher stories. Can you imagine the picture of workmen flying in all directions with tools, each one busily employed? It is promised that the present generation of employees will live to see the completion of this notable structure. ”

“ We showed that space is an idea of the mind, or form of our perceiving power, independent of experience, by pointing out that we possess necessary and universal truths concerning the relations of space, which could never be given by means of experience; but of which the necessity is readily conceivable, if we suppose them to have for their basis the constitution of the mind. ”

“ But if the brain cannot serve such a purpose, in what warehouse shall we store the accumulated images?—We forget that the relation of container to content borrows its apparent clearness and universality from the necessity laid upon us of always opening out space in front of us, and of always closing duration behind us. ”

“ But when the message turns out to be of evidential value it is presumably because this subliminal portion of the person is in touch, either telepathically or in some other way, with intelligences not ordinarily accessible,—with living people at a distance perhaps, or more often with the apparently more accessible people who have passed on, for whom distance in the ordinary sense seems hardly to exist, and whose links of connexion are of a kind other than spatial. ”

“ BY speaking of space as an Idea, I intend to imply, as has already been stated, that the apprehension of objects as existing in space, and of the relations of position, &c., prevailing among them, is not a consequence of experience, but a result of a peculiar constitution and activity of the mind, which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise. ”