Absolute space and time vanish in astronomy; and one has to be very careful in rediscovering absolutes in moral conduct, when all ideas of the permanence of substance, either in astronomy or nuclear physics, appear to be illusory. Hence my preference for the “perfectly relaxed consciousness” as the foundation of my theory of consciousness, and my analysis of conduct; in this way I keep clear of matter, and the illusion of permanence which its solidity conceals. I attempt to keep my feet on the ground of experience! Kant’s misfortune was to be born before his time, and before the scientific research of the 19th and 20th centuries showed the fallacies in his assumptions.
It must also be remembered, that as any attitude of mind is brought into being by a particular type of nervous tension in the body, every lawyer’s attitude of mind will be slightly different from every other lawyer’s, and its assumptions ever so slightly different too. This is entirely consistent with Einstein’s Relativity, in which he postulated that each one of us has a unique frame of reference in space and time, however little it may differ from everyone else’s. In fact there are as many attitudes of mind as there are stars in the heavens, or as the tunes you can compose from the 12 notes on the piano that go to make up an octave, or as there are persons who actually think. And the great function of professional discipline is to try to ensure that the differences between the various attitudes of mind of lawyers, or between those of staff officers in the Army, are sufficiently small that in practice they can usually be ignored. But misunderstandings are still possible, despite the best professional training, if only because some people are public spirited and others are out for themselves, with the result that their thinking is based on different assumptions.
Nor does the attitude of mind of a man or woman remain the same throughout the year, or the day, or the moment. It is one of the first cardinal assertions in my book, which I illustrate by two legal examples, that a human being can alter his or her attitude of mind by an effort of will, to a limited extent, at least momentarily; and that this ability is an essential part of making up one’s mind about anything. In particular, cross-examination is a waste of time, unless one can see things through the eyes of others. So all that I have said so far about attitudes of mind takes place in the world of human relationships. It is useless trying to conduct a legal case, or any part of it, in a cold detached way; and I would have thought pretty useless doing anything in a cold detached way, without considering the likely reaction of other human beings, either from sympathy or from Machiavellian cynicism.
So my experience is that there are laws in the spiritual world governing human conduct, which run parallel with the laws in Natural Science. And I would have thought that there has been a fair degree of unanimity about this, from the poet who wrote the 119th psalm to Henry Drummond, a lecturer in biology and geology and a prophet of the Free Church of Scotland in the late 19th century. But in my experience laws in the spiritual world are often laws of trust and confidence; and I think it is a misuse of language to describe these as laws of cause and effect, which is how most people regard the laws of Natural Science. My view is that one should just accept consciousness as one of the realities of life; and use the theory of consciousness to explore the spiritual world, which is fragmented and appears largely disorganized without it. But if you are so daring as to try to look for the origin of consciousness, and try to underpin the laws of human conduct with mathematics, I think you would need more than the 4 dimensions of space-time to produce a coherent picture. More even than the 5 dimensions, which when I was an undergraduate we heard that Herman Bondi at St.John’s was playing with in his study of mathematics and maybe of particle physics.
Teilhard de Chardin agreed with him about the 5th dimension; biologist, palaeontologist and Jesuit priest, he wrote and argued that it was absurd to assume that the biophysics and biochemistry of the brain would necessarily be the same as the physics and chemistry of astronomy or of the hydrogen & helium atoms; and he postulated that there was a 5th dimension, which he called “complexity”, and which he certainly thought applied to the physical workings of the brain.