We all have our preferences. Certainly. Loren Eiseley
preferred a past of millions and millions of years. Actually better was a
“sunlit and timeless prairie” – gone beyond time. Even millions could not be
enough. Or at least from “ I look up across the moon and Venus – outward,
outward into that blue-white glitter beyond the galaxy… Have we come from
elsewhere? … Has not the great 200-inch reflector upon Mount Palomar already
spied out the prospect?” It was common enough to place too much hope on what
Palomar could do for us. At least it could be used, as here, to again get beyond
time, to be from simply out-there somewhere, and time need not be mentioned.
Of course he isn’t there, as he wasn’t, of course, “in” the
time of which he wrote. And so he speculated – “Perhaps there is no meaning at
all, … save the journey itself…” There was denied to humankind “the dimension
of time.” Reasoning thus could take him up “against the confining walls of
scientific method” and push him over the wall to “the intangible substance of
hope which at the last proves unanalyzable by science, yet out of which the
human dream is made.” It’s easy. Put yourself where you can’t go.
With Darwin’s evolution and its variants, you got trapped in
the physical, structural variables and lose a perspective on how humankind came
about, from where, not when, did humankind get intellectualization in excess.
To separate itself from animals, it has been noted humankind had its knowledge
of mathematics while other said it was the conscience of humankind that did the
trick. A greater thinker than Darwin was Alfred Russell Wallace who knew
natural selection couldn’t put into humankind capabilities far beyond its
needs. If it could have, why so far back in time, to what use to have it and
not use it since its possession has been synonymous with its use? Or, as
Wallace, thought, said Eiseley, that which was “us” came later.
Once you have those millions and millions of years at your
disposal, it would seem all of evolution could surely take place. No limit to
fashioning sequences of changes via natural selection. But saying it and
proving it is the flip side of millions and millions – it is too general, the
specificity can’t be located. It became an article of faith that what was
assumed to have occurred to carry along pre-humankind, humankind, and
post-humankind was not an assumption but really the truth. Assumptions, begging
reality, become a dogma. A solid foundation for organic change was derived from
geology. Geology supplies the crush of millions and millions of years. Once
started, as Wallace observed (and noted by Eiseley), evolution became subject
to “indefinite departure” no return, ever onward.
So onward and it is assumed the past is “there” and onward
has been traversed and we are “here” at present, and onward again we will
arrive at the “future”. As for now, we are said to be very aware of “our” time
and how it has disintegrated into, said Eiseley, “a meaningless mosaic of fragments”
and cannot be packaged, made whole into a past where we were. Someone was there,
just not us. We are persisting because of our specialization, that is, our
intelligence, our “smarts” and so we avoid what 90% of Earth’s creatures had
experienced – extinction. Or are we ready to give it up, the intelligence, and
realize the “smarts’ were wasted on us? The ape-like survived well enough for a
very long time. Then somehow the nascent “we” came along. There too was an
increase in “smarts” for no good reason, then it was “us.”
Such change, for Eiseley, was within “limitless change in
limitless time.” Thomas H. Huxley was read by Eiseley in a way so that Eiseley
could convey that uncontrolled conviction, and thematically he entered into it
in isolation, touting lonely, cold death. Nevertheless, his style borrowed from
Paul Sears who had a classical-humanist tinge for science and literature. In
Eiseley’s Scientific American articles around 1942, he got mystery, pathos, and
wonder mixed in. He could not wholly accept materialism or the scientific method;
he couldn’t detail what he sensed. It was a vast and single entity.
If its sense could be found as a derivative of humankind’s
insatiable curiosity, Eiseley foresaw in The Firmament of Time we would find
that secret to be boring. Without a tinge of conscience, the conscience which
he thought, as previously mentioned, separated humankind from the animals
(never mind that much earlier was the presumption that our use of mathematics
involving the calculation of the date for Easter was the distinguishing
feature). He resurrected the “Christian order” for small amounts of
contemporary stability and good graces with no amount of morals in sight. And
he left it at that, not liking the age, the era – but then he wasn’t above
changing the truth for poetic expression, so why bother?
Then, too, the future need not concern us. There we could
discover our past. We could know what we don’t know now. We could be fossils
for them, those of the future. They could come from the stars, as we may have
gone there. The paths may not cross. Millions and millions of years might not
be necessary for the missed opportunity. Though, of course, those millions and
millions of years are always available, such flexible entities they are. They
aren’t going to encounter morals like Eiseley did along the way since science
(evolution) was formulated without them and the scientific method, if mastered,
cannot be improved upon or so it is said. Those millions and millions of years,
confidently enunciated, have at the disposal of those who used them for the
negation of all morality and for which then morals are a joke and God along
with them.
All joking aside, those millions and millions of years are
accepted as real. Within them A is A and B is B. Certainly in the brain there
is B and A or their representatives. But you say A then B. Where is the
“then” in the brain? Nowhere to be found, certainly one must admit. No evidentiary
material can be provided. What produced it? An extensive hunt is not necessary
– the mind, is the answer. It supplies the “then,” it makes an insertion for A
and B.
All joking aside, which came first – the motion or the mind?
And now quickly before it melts, how did motion become time? If no change of
position, no dynamics, it is stasis. Nothing but A, B, C, … But mind makes an
insertion so A and B and so on were already on the field of play, so to speak.
The brain had to have A and B prior to the insertion.
Most certainly A and B were real. The brain couldn’t
properly relate to the imaginary. But no “then” in the brain. That is the
province of mind. A lack of reality allowed it to place, to make an insertion
such that it allowed for motion, relation and millions and millions of years.
All false. Time and its minions are no more real than the mechanism lacking in
evolution to account for the mind.
A baby playing peek-a-boo better exemplifies the emergence
of mind. You are at A, baby is at A. You at B. Baby at B. You at A and B in
succession. Then you are at A and stay but baby is at B. Lastly, a baby’s eyes
can follow an object as it moves. The mind is already there. It wasn’t there at
birth, as was the brain. The truth of space, from the brain, is there. The
falsity of time comes later.
Eiseley never had those millions and millions of years, not
really.
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