That romantic and probably apocalyptic comes back into one's mind on reading Mr. Dunne's latest book. Keats, on looking into Chapman's Homer, could feel that he was looking at a new ocean of imagination. On reading Mr. Dunne's books anyone, mathematician, moralist, psychologist, or politician, must realise that he is looking not at a new world of imagination—indeed, it is unimaginable—but, if it is true, a world more real than that one of commonsense which up till now we have called reality.

  Malebranche, the philosopher, is said to have remarked when he looked down that new instrument the microscope for the first time, "This is an end of size." Reading Mr. Dunne one must feel that here is an end of time as we have thought of it.

Experiments in Prevision

  As nearly everyone knows, Mr. Dunne published in 1927 a book called "An Experiment with Time," an odd title for an odd story. He told with great lucidity the story of some experiences he had had in prevision; how he had found that he dreamt quite frequently of the future and how he had taught a number of his friends to recall their dreams, with the result that they, too, found that they had previsionary dreams. Not content with that, being a mathematician, he went on and made a theory to make what was obviously impossible to commonsense agreeable to advanced science. Mathematicians do not seem wholly agreed that his theory does fit in with the multidimensional universe which physicists now accept, but quite a number of people who spoilt their sleep by recording their dreams have confirmed the fact he stated—that queer, confused but unmistakable evidence of the future does come to many people in sleep.

  Since then the number of such cases has increased, and other studies have been made of prevision. It still seems doubtful whether anyone can, in a fortnight, by noting their dreams, obtain evidence that some faculty in them foresees the future. But the evidence does grow that some people have this faculty. And the resistance to the evidence on a priori grounds weakens. The multidimensional conception that space and time are really two aspects of one continuum has sunk into the layman's mind. The fourth dimension has ceased to be a joke and become a very awkward possibility.

  Now Mr. Dunne comes forward again with a really amazing simplicity of style and diagram, and tries to make it possible for the ordinary man to grasp what sort of universe he actually lives in. In his theory of Serial Time it is possible to make prevision quite natural, to demonstrate the soul and deity.

  Surely such a cosmology will have an immense welcome. Yet doubts arise. It is not that mathematicians may challenge the mathematical reconciliation of the previsionary universe. If the evidence of prevision stands it seems a natural symptom of such a universe and the fitting in of the evidence with the theory a question for technicians. If you do foresee the future then time cannot be what common sense assumed it to be—an assumption which no mathematician, whatever he thinks of Serialism, would defend.

  There can, then, be no doubt that something of immense importance is coming to light, but doubt grows when we try to speculate as to what on earth man is going to do with this discovery. Here is our world up to its neck in its New Deals, Five-Year Plans, re-awakening armament races, its determination to shape and carve the future as no other age has cut and constructed, regardless of anything but hard materialistic fact. Suddenly all the projected lines of these hard futures begin to waver and to melt.

  It is really too much. One thing is clear. If we are going to achieve the power of seeing the future, then that is the end of an epoch, the end of all materialistic progress.

  Maybe we are about to pass a frontier of human knowledge so that those on the other side of it will look back on us as creatures so limited by their ignorance, so restricted by their fundamental illusion about time, so confined to gross and clumsy material ends that, beside their enlightened selves, there will seem little to choose between us and animals.

  But if that is the point we have reached, the gap that opens is so great that we can have no more idea what life will be like on the other side of it than we can imagine what life after death can be like, however much we may realise that it exists. All we can know is that it is Goodbye to All This.

  That, I think, is why this idea at present is making so little impression. Indeed, one may perhaps go further and speculate that as soon as it does begin to make a difference and people began to realise what it means, governments may begin to act. It has often been speculated whether governments will ever again persecute opinions which are not political, as once theories of the universe such as Manichaeanism were persecuted out of existence. Here, maybe, lies a test case. Should Serialism, or any other system of spying and making a new use of the future, catch on, we may see the great economic-fixated states, unable to change, fighting for their lives and making it a capital offence for people to have knowledge of other dimensions. The possession of "The Serial Universe" or "An Experiment with Time" may become grave crimes.

  Such speculation may seem groundless, but if these books stand for anything, are true at all, they mean so much that the outlook of every human being can be changed, and governments cannot disregard that.