my back. He hands it to me, then, hacking and chopping, I head into the brush. It’s slow going. Two or three branches must be cut for every step. It may go on like this for a long time.
The first step down from Ph?drus’ statement that “Quality is the Buddha” is a statement that such an assertion, if true, provides a rational basis for a unification of three areas of human experience which are now disunified. These three areas are Religion, Art and Science. If it can be shown that Quality is the central term of all three, and that this Quality is not of many kinds but of one kind only, then it follows that the three disunified areas have a basis for introconversion.
The relationship of Quality to the area of Art has been shown rather exhaustively through a pursuit of Ph?drus’ understanding of Quality in the Art of rhetoric. I don’t think much more in the way of analysis need be made there. Art is high-quality endeavor. That is all that really needs to be said. Or, if something more high- sounding is demanded: Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man. The relationship established by Ph?drus makes it clear that the two enormously different sounding statements are actually identical.
In the area of Religion, the rational relationship of Quality to the Godhead needs to be more thoroughly established, and this I hope to do much later on. For the time being one can meditate on the fact that the old English roots for the Buddha and Quality, God and good, appear to be identical. It’s in the area of Science that I want to focus attention in the immediate future, for this is the area that most badly needs the relationship established. The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are “value free”, that is, “quality free”, has got to go. It’s that “value freedom” that underlines the death-force effect to which attention was brought early in the Chautauqua. Tomorrow I intend to start on that.
For the remainder of the afternoon we climb down over grey weathered trunks of deadfalls and angle back and forth on the steep slope.
We reach a cliff, angle along its edge in search of a way down, and eventually a narrow draw appears which we’re able to descend. It continues down through a rocky crevice in which there is a little rivulet. Shrubs and rocks and muck and roots of huge trees watered by the rivulet fill the crevice. Then we hear the roar of a much larger creek in the distance.
We cross the creek using a rope, which we leave behind, then on the road beyond find some other campers who give us a ride into town.
In Bozeman it’s dark and late. Rather than wake up the DeWeeses and ask them to drive in, we check in at the main downtown hotel. Some tourists in the lobby stare at us. With my old Army clothes, walking stick, two-day beard and black beret I must look like some old-time Cuban revolutionary, in for a raid.
In the hotel room we exhaustedly dump everything on the floor. I empty into a waste basket the stones picked up by my boots from the rushing water of the stream, then set the boots by a cold window to dry slowly. We collapse into the beds without a word.
22
The next morning we check out of the hotel feeling refreshed, say goodbye to the DeWeeses, and head north on the open road out of Bozeman. The DeWeeses wanted us to stay, but a peculiar itching to move west and get on with my thoughts has taken over. I want to talk today about a person whom Ph?drus never heard of, but whose writings I’ve studied quite extensively in preparation for this Chautauqua. Unlike Ph?drus, this man was an international celebrity at thirty-five, a living legend at fifty-eight, whom Bertrand Russell has described as “by general agreement, the most eminent scientific man of his generation.” He was an astronomer, a physicist, a mathematician and philosopher all in one. His name was Jules Henri Poincare.
It always seemed incredible to me, and still does, I guess, that Ph?drus should have traveled along a line of thought that had never been traveled before. Someone, somewhere, must have thought of all this before, and Ph?drus was such a poor scholar it would have been just like him to have duplicated the commonplaces of some famous system of philosophy he hadn’t taken the trouble to look into.
So I spent more than a year reading the very long and sometimes very tedious history of philosophy in a search for duplicate ideas. It was a fascinating way to read the history of philosophy, however, and a thing occurred of which I still don’t know quite what to make. Philosophical systems that are supposed to be greatly opposed to one another both seem to be saying something very close to what Ph?drus thought, with minor variations. Time after time I thought I’d found whom he was duplicating, but each time, because of what appeared to be some slight differences, he took a greatly different direction. Hegel, for example, whom I referred to earlier, rejected Hindu systems of philosophy as no philosophy at all. Ph?drus seemed to assimilate them, or be assimilated by them. There was no feeling of contradiction.
Eventually I came to Poincare. Here again there was little duplication but another kind of phenomenon. Ph?drus follows a long and tortuous path into the highest abstractions, seems about to come down and then stops. Poincare starts with the most basic scientific verities, works up to the same abstractions and then stops. Both trails stop right at each other’s end! There is perfect continuity between them. When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event. Like Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of footprints on the sand.
Poincare lived from 1854 to 1912, a professor at the University of Paris. His beard and pince-nez were reminiscent of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who lived in Paris at the same time and was only ten years younger.
During Poincare’s lifetime, an alarmingly deep crisis in the foundations of the exact sciences had begun. For years scientific truth had been beyond the possibility of a doubt; the logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules. The great questions had all been answered. The mission of science was now simply to refine these answers to greater and greater accuracy. True, there were still unexplained phenomena such as radioactivity, transmission of light through the “ether”, and the peculiar relationship of magnetic to electric forces; but these, if past trends were any indication, had eventually to fall. It was hardly guessed by anyone that within a few decades there would be no more absolute space, absolute time, absolute substance or even absolute magnitude; that classical physics, the scientific rock of ages, would become “approximate”; that the soberest and most respected of astronomers would be telling mankind that if it looked long enough through a telescope powerful enough, what it would see was the back of its own head!
The basis of the foundation-shattering Theory of Relativity was as yet understood only by very few, of whom Poincare, as the most eminent mathematician of his time, was one.
In his Foundations of Science Poincare explained that the antecedents of the crisis in the foundations of science were very old. It had long been sought in vain, he said, to demonstrate the axiom known as Euclid’s fifth postulate and this search was the start of the crisis. Euclid’s postulate of parallels, which states that through a given point there’s not more than one parallel line to a given straight line, we usually learn in tenth-grade geometry. It is one of the basic building blocks out of which the entire mathematics of geometry is constructed.
All the other axioms seemed so obvious as to be unquestionable, but this one did not. Yet you couldn’t get rid of it without destroying huge portions of the mathematics, and no one seemed able to reduce it to anything more elementary. What vast effort had been wasted in that chimeric hope was truly unimaginable, Poincare said.
Finally, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and almost at the same time, a Hungarian and a Russian… Bolyai and Lobachevski… established irrefutably that a proof of Euclid’s fifth postulate is impossible. They did this by reasoning that if there were any way to reduce Euclid’s postulate to other, surer axioms, another effect would also be noticeable: a reversal of Euclid’s postulate would create logical contradictions in the geometry. So they reversed Euclid’s postulate.
Lobachevski assumes at the start that through a given point can be drawn two parallels to a given straight. And he retains besides all Euclid’s other axioms. From these hypotheses he deduces a series of theorems among which it’s impossible to find any contradiction, and he constructs a geometry whose faultless logic is inferior in nothing to that of the Euclidian geometry.
Thus by his failure to find any contradictions he proves that the fifth postulate is irreducible to simpler
