3.1 Introducing Welby’s Puzzling Claims on Matter and Motion

Lucy Reference CliffordClifford (1924, 101–2) sheds light on the chronology of Welby’s intellectual development when she recalls a trip they took to Switzerland in 1886: ‘it was soon evident that she was in a transition stage, dreaming and evolving theories of her own, reaching out towards the thinkers – humbly seeking knowledge from them and encouragement to pursue her own tracks of thought’. I find it highly plausible that 1886 was a ‘transition stage’ for Welby, for her metaphysical claims emerge forcibly from that year onwards.

From around that period, Welby repeatedly states that ‘Motion’, or the ‘dynamic’, is prior to matter. Here are some examples. The following passage is taken from an 1886–8 letter to theologian W. H. Simcox:

This is from an 1889–90 letter to another theologian, Edmund McClure:

In What Is Meaning?, Reference WelbyWelby (1983 [1903], 174) reiterates that ‘Motion’ and the ‘dynamic’ are primary, whilst ‘Matter’ and the ‘static’ are secondary.

Reference WelbyWelby’s 1907 ‘Time as Derivative’ claims that, once we have improved our conception of Motion:

I have found a 1902 draft of ‘Time as Derivative’, which adds:

Finally, consider this passage from a letter to William James, dated 24 May 1908:

In the absence of further explanation, these statements are puzzling, even obscure. I argue we can best understand them by looking to Welby’s engagement with the physics of her period.

3.2 Welby’s Engagement with Vortex Theories of Matter

A major milestone of Victorian physics was the development of ‘field theories’. On these theories, phenomena such as electromagnetism are derived from a more fundamental medium – a field. From the 1860s, William Thomson (later, Lord Kelvin) developed a new kind of field theory: the ‘vortex’ theory of matter. Earlier thinkers had suggested that electromagnetic waves, including light, travelled through an undetectable, space-filling field or substance known as ‘ether’. Building on this, Reference ThomsonThomson (1867, 15–17) argued we should stop conceiving material atoms as ‘strong and infinitely rigid pieces of matter’. Instead, we should conceive them as ‘vortex atoms’, akin to moving vortices within liquid. Thomson compares vortex atoms with the rings of smoke produced by cigars or cigarettes. He records recently witnessing a ‘magnificent display of smoke-rings’, wherein the rings bounced off each other, ‘shaking violently from the effects of the shock’, yet elastically maintaining their shape. Vortex atoms are, however, more complex than smoke-rings: although Thomson conceives them roughly as rings, a closed loop with two ends meeting, these atoms can be ‘knotted or knitted’ in many different ways. He argues that the variety of vortices, and their interplay, could potentially explain all material phenomena.Footnote ¹³

Thomson’s vortex theory of matter had a huge impact on late-nineteenth-century British science. In her pioneering study of its history, Reference DoranDoran (1975, 197) explains that this ‘program for a field theory of matter … was widely subscribed to in Britain by 1880’. Physicist Reference LodgeOliver Lodge (1883b, 329–30) described Thomson’s theory as ‘highly beautiful’, ‘the simplest conception of the material universe which has yet occurred’, a theory which almost ‘deserves to be true’. Lodge (who would later defend his own vortex theory) usefully summarises how it was understood in the early 1880s:

Of especial interest to us is how physicists understood Thomson’s theory of matter:

Just as motions in water create whirlpools, motions in another medium create material bodies. As Lodge’s description exemplifies, some vortex theorists explicitly conceive matter as motions of ether. However, others simply conceive matter as motions; implying either that there is no underlying medium, or else leaving the nature of the underlying medium open. Some of these latter, motion-focused accounts drew on Reference ThomsonThomson’s (1884, 204) statement: ‘it is scarcely possible to help anticipating … the arrival at a complete theory of matter, in which all its properties will be seen to be merely attributes of motion’. This section will now set out three texts defending vortex theories of matter.Footnote ¹⁴

The first is Reference StoneyG. Johnstone Stoney’s 1885 paper, ‘How Thought Presents Itself in Nature’. Stoney was an Irish physicist, best known for his work on light, gases, the solar system, and for advancing towards the discovery of the ‘electron’ – a term he coined.Footnote ¹⁵ In the introduction to this paper, Reference StoneyStoney (1885, 178–9) explains that science has shown the universe to exhibit greater ‘simplicity’ than previously realised. The simplicities he identifies all concern motion. For example, ‘Sound is Motion’, such as vibrating piano strings; and ‘Light is Motion’, for we see objects via motions in the molecules affecting our retinas. Reference StoneyStoney (1885, 186–7) states that force, mass, and energy are merely ‘functions of the motions’. Our bodies comprise motions, including the vibrations of nerve fibres, and ‘intricate’ movements within the brain. He claims there need not be any ‘mysterious entity’ called ‘substance’: we need not accept that ‘underlying every motion must be some thing to be moved’. He summarises these findings as follows:

For Stoney, science shows that the material universe is really ‘a mass of motions’.

The second is Reference RomanesGeorge Romanes’ 1885 paper, ‘Mind and Motion’. Romanes was a Canadian-Scots evolutionary biologist, best known for his work on the nervous system, natural selection, and mental evolution.Footnote ¹⁶ The paper declares:

For Romanes, matter is only known to us as ‘changes of motion’.

The third text is Reference PearsonKarl Pearson’s 1892 The Grammar of Science. Pearson was an English mathematician and philosopher, best known for ‘almost single-handedly’ establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics.Footnote ¹⁷ As its title indicates, The Grammar of Science is partly concerned with scientific language: Reference PearsonPearson (1892, viii) aims to address the ‘obscurity’ enveloping scientific principles. However, it also makes many claims about matter. Some of these claims were foreshadowed in another book Welby owned: Reference PearsonPearson’s 1888 The Ethic of Freethought.Footnote ¹⁸ For example, this text states:

But The Grammar of Science discusses matter in far more detail. In a chapter titled ‘Matter’, Reference PearsonPearson (1892, 330) claims that, for many thinkers, the ‘notion of matter’ is ‘obscure’. Against the ‘commonsense’ conception of matter as ‘impenetrable’ atoms, Reference PearsonPearson (1892, 304–5) argues that other conceptions are available. He considers ‘a wave on the surface of the sea’, as in Figure 1. Waves maintain their identity as they travel across water, suggesting another conception of matter:

Figure 1 Waves moving across the sea. Taken from Reference PearsonPearson (1900, 256).

This image is in the public domain; it is reproduced (with permission) from a copy at Durham University Library

On this theory, the water does not move; what moves is the wave, a ‘form of motion’. For Pearson, a material body is like a wave: it is not an impenetrable particle, but a form of motion.

Over commonsense conceptions of matter, Reference PearsonPearson (1892, 309–10) prefers ether theories: ‘it is the great hope of science at the present day that “hard and heavy matter” will be shown to be ether in motion’. If we could account for all our ‘sense-impressions of hardness, weight, colour, temperature, cohesion’, and so on via ‘the motions of a single medium’, our scientific descriptions would be ‘immensely simplified’. Reference PearsonPearson (1892, 317–18) goes on to explain that, on Thomson’s account of vortex atoms as rings, ‘the substratum of an atom always consists of the same elements of moving ether’. Just as a smoke-ring always consists of the same smoke molecules, Thomson seems to conceive vortex atoms as always consisting of the same parts of the ether. Against this, Pearson offers an alternative account. Ocean waves need not consist of the same seawater molecules, and the same goes for vortex atoms:

For Pearson, vortex atoms are squirts – modes of motion. If we turned on a tap underwater, Reference PearsonPearson (1892, 320–1) explains that ‘the pressure produced by the flow of water’ might produce ‘new sense-impressions’ in the region of the squirt – the water might seem ‘hard and impenetrable’. ‘Such squirts, although only water in motion, might form very material groups of sense-impressions.’ Pearson speculates that the squirts originate in a fourth dimension of space; to explain this, he cites the novel Flatland.

We perceive three spatial dimensions – length, width, and depth – but mathematicians have long theorised more. Charles Hinton’s 1880s work popularised theories of the ‘fourth dimension’, likely inspiring Reference AbbottEdwin Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland (initially published under the memorable pseudonym, ‘A. Square’). Flatland describes creatures that can only perceive limited numbers of spatial dimensions: Linelanders perceive one; Flatlanders perceive two; whilst we humans, Spacelanders, perceive three. Reference AbbottAbbott (1884, x) writes that, just as Flatlanders struggle conceive the third dimension, Spacelanders struggle to conceive the ‘Fourth unrecognised Dimension … called by no name at present’. Reference PearsonPearson (1892, 322–3) rightly notes that for some years ‘four-dimensioned space’ has ‘formed the subject of elaborate investigations by some of our best mathematicians’. His speculation, that if we could travel ‘out through’ ether squirts we would arrive in a higher dimension, is ‘intended for those minds which … cannot wholly repress their metaphysical tendencies’.

With this scientific background in place, let’s return to Welby. I have set out these particular defences of vortex atoms because Welby engaged closely with all three of them. (As she corresponded at length with Lodge, from 1895 to 1911, she was likely familiar with his pertinent works too, but I have not yet found evidence of this.Footnote ¹⁹) Welby’s copy of Stoney’s ‘How Thought Presents Itself in Nature’ is well annotated, and she underlines its claim that all phenomena is ‘simply a mass of motions’.Footnote ²⁰ She also took notes on Reference StoneyStoney’s 1903 ‘On the Dependence of What Apparently Takes Place in Nature upon What Actually Occurs in the Universe of Real Existences’, which advocates for many of the same theses; interestingly, these notes seem to address Stoney directly. As Welby corresponded with Stoney in 1905,Footnote ²¹ these notes may actually be a letter. They show that she accepted his account of matter:

When Welby states that motion constructs body, I believe this is precisely what she has in mind.

Welby also took notes on Romanes’ ‘Mind and Motion’, stressing ‘Motion the ultimate fact’ (emphasis in original).Footnote ²³ This article prompted her to write to Romanes, and they corresponded intermittently from 1887 to 1892. In her first letter, dated 11 March 1887, Welby writes that she has ‘been very much struck’ by ‘Mind and Motion’, and it corresponds with ‘long cherished ideas of my own’.Footnote ²⁴ They met for the first time shortly afterwards. In a letter to Vernon Lee dated 31 March 1887, Welby writes, ‘since my last visit to London and the long talks there with … Mr Romanes, and others among the younger and “coming” thinkers … my work has entered on a fresh stage’.Footnote ²⁵

Welby also hugely admired Pearson’s Grammar of Science, which she read by at least March 1892.Footnote ²⁶ In a letter to the ‘Vicar of Leeds’, likely authored in 1892,Footnote ²⁷ she writes of it:

I have found forty-four of those pages, comprising extracts from The Grammar of Science, and Welby’s notes on its ‘main positions’.Footnote ²⁸ Welby clearly distinguishes her views from Pearson’s using brackets and blue chalk. As you would expect, she praises Pearson for reconsidering ‘the right use of language’, adding that the book ‘may be considered as virtually an Essay in practical “Semantics”’. Yet she also comments on his theory of matter. Of Pearson’s thesis that the notion of matter is ‘obscure’, Welby writes, ‘These are words of which it is difficult to exaggerate the importance.’ Of his conception of matter as forms of motion, Welby writes, ‘And here as elsewhere I find scientifically expressed and described what for years has been at the spring of all my thinking.’ She notes that Thomson and Pearson’s conceptions of atoms are both valuable, for both stress ‘activity’, not ‘substance’, with regard to ‘matter’. Of Pearson’s view that science would be simplified if we could account for ‘matter’ via ‘motion’, Welby writes that this would be ‘significant’. Of Pearson’s speculation regarding the fourth dimensional origin of ether, Welby writes, ‘Instead of recoiling from, we have to penetrate the materialist’s cobweb “barrier,” – which falls at the sound of the author’s trumpet, – and come out at the further “side”.’ Welby evidently felt that Pearson’s view offered a means of rejecting materialism; I’ll say on more on this in Section 5. Welby tried several times to strike up a correspondence with Pearson, asking him for mathematical advice in 1887; and sporadically raising topics such as The Grammar of Science and What Is Meaning? from 1903 to 1911. However, he politely declined to engage with her.Footnote ²⁹

Given Welby’s deep involvement with these three texts, I argue they are at least partly responsible for what Lucy Clifford called Welby’s ‘transition stage’, during which she evolved ‘theories of her own’. It is to those theories that we now turn.

3.3 Welby’s Metaphysic of Motion

Stoney, Romanes, Pearson, and many other Victorian scientists argued in various ways that matter is motion. I read Welby as defending this thesis. Against this background, many of her above remarks about Motion cease to be puzzling. Traditionally, material bodies such as tables and rocks are conceived as stable lumps of matter – as ‘static’. Yet vortex theories of matter conceived material bodies as motions – as ‘dynamic’. If the vortex theorists are correct, then it is reasonable to claim that the dynamic is prior to the static, that motion ‘constructs’ matter. Of course there is motion in every molecule of the solar system: material molecules are motion. And, punning on the English expression ‘stuff and nonsense’, it is no surprise to find Welby arguing that our ‘ruling fetish of stuff’ is ‘nonsense’: ultimately, stuff does not exist, there is only motion.

This reading helps us understand many further texts in Welby. For example, in a letter to British empiricist Shadworth Hodgson dated 12 October 1891, Welby writes of motion:

A spinning top is more stable the faster it spins. Analogously, Welby is arguing that the more intense the motion, the more rigid the resulting entity.

At some point before March 1892, Welby loaned her friend the lawyer and philosopher Norman Pearson a ‘Proceedings’ by Stoney – given the date, this was likely ‘How Thought Presents Itself in Nature’. In a letter dated 9 March 1892, Pearson returned the paper, and raises a worry for it: ‘Mr Stoney does not dispose of the difficulty which he partly admits i.e. motions imply something that move, and what is this something.’ Returning to this issue in a letter dated 10 October 1892, Welby implicitly affirms a commitment to ‘the idea of motion as apart from a thing which moves’. She adds, ‘Stoney, K. Pearson, O. Lodge &c put what I mean much better than I can: in this case I know I am “on the crest of a rising tide”!’. As Welby found Karl Pearson’s thesis that matter comprises modes of motion, on which no ‘thing’ moves, to be a scientific expression of ‘what for years has been at the spring of all my thinking’, she almost certainly has this thesis in mind. As The Grammar of Science illustrates this thesis using ocean waves, Welby’s ‘rising tide’ metaphor may be a private joke.

A few weeks later, in a letter dated 1 November 1892, Welby writes to Norman Pearson:

In a letter dated 8 January 1893, Welby draws Norman Pearson’s attention to an article in Mind, which she paraphrases as follows: ‘all we perceive is movement and … it is an inherited fallacy that there must be something moved!’.Footnote ³¹ On this, she comments approvingly, ‘Hear hear’.

Assuming this reading of Welby on Motion is correct, it raises a question. What is Motion? Possibly, Welby conceives it as ether: her 1908 letter to James refers to rapid motions ‘of some “third” element, apparently “ether”?’. Yet the question mark indicates that this suggestion is tentative. I argue we should read Welby’s conception of Motion as energy. To make this case, I’ll start with the textual evidence that hints towards this reading. For example, as we saw in Section 3, Welby’s 1889–90 letter to McClure states that we should replace ‘substance’ with ‘a complex of energy’. Similarly, in a letter to novelist and lobbyist Mrs Humphry Ward dated 15 May 1887, Welby writes:

This passage conceives our planet, a material body, as a collection of energies. If matter is motion, and matter is also energy, then Welby may conceive motion as energy.

Earlier in this Element we saw that ‘Time as Derivative’ makes a related claim – that matter indicates resistance. Explaining this requires some background. Several Victorian philosophers held that we only experience matter as resistance. For example, Reference SpencerHerbert Spencer (1862, 232–3) claims our primary experience of matter is ‘resistance’, such as door opposing our ‘muscular energies’. He understands resistance as ‘Force’. Reference SpencerSpencer (1862, 251) identifies Force with the subject of the scientific principle the ‘Conservation of Force’, better known today as the ‘Conservation of Energy’; Victorians sometimes used the terms ‘force’ or ‘energy’ interchangeably.Footnote ³³ In an article published during September 1886 that likely draws on Spencer, Reference PearsonNorman Pearson (1886, 360) agrees that ‘our primary notion of matter is simply of something which offers resistance to muscular energy’. Furthermore, he understands resistance as Force: ‘That which opposes force must be itself force.’ Welby was familiar with the work of both men, and she wrote to Pearson about this article specifically.Footnote ³⁴ Given this, I read the claim that ‘matter’ indicates ‘resistance’ as meaning that ‘matter’ indicates force or energy.

Hints aside, I find compelling evidence that Welby conceives Motion as energy in her engagement with the work of another vortex matter theorist. In 1897, Lord William Armstrong published Electric Movement in Air and Water: With Theoretical Inferences.Footnote ³⁵ As Reference ArmstrongArmstrong (1897b, 6) explains, the larger part of this book uses photography to illustrate ‘electric effects hitherto invisible and unknown’, such as photographing electric discharges through water. It is the smaller, ‘theoretical’ part of the book that interests us. Reference ArmstrongArmstrong (1897a, 8–9) accepts ‘Lord Kelvin’s [Thomson’s] views on vortex atoms’, on which ‘vortex motion must be the most universal of all motions’. He continues:

Armstrong suggests that material molecules are motions. Yet, he asks, must we assume they are motions of ether? This passage describes ‘motion’ and ‘ether’ as ‘inscrutable’, unknowable. As they are both inscrutable, Armstrong asks whether we ‘gain much’ by positing two inscrutables, rather than one. We are ‘more familiar’ with motion: we experience it, and it is well-studied by science. In contrast, ether cannot be experienced, or even observed by science. Consequently, he suggests we posit motion only.

Reference ArmstrongArmstrong (1897b, 6) expanded on these remarks in The Times, explaining that his characterisation of molecules as motions is not equivalent to saying ‘that we can have motion without anything being moved’. He accepts that motion assumes ‘something to pass from place to place’. But what is that something? Armstrong’s answer is energy: ‘It may be questionable whether we can properly call energy a “thing”; but there can be no doubt that it is a reality which moves and does work.’ He argues this answer is preferable to material ‘corpuscles’, which are ‘unsupported by any reliable evidence’; and to ether, because ‘motion in conjunction with energy is a fact, while ether is only a hypothesis’.

In Armstrong’s thinking, Welby found confirmation of her own. On 15 February 1898, she wrote to him saying so.Footnote ³⁶ As this unpublished letter is so important, I quote from it at length:

This letter confirms my reading of Welby’s account of material bodies or molecules as ‘modes of motion’. For Welby, modes of Motion move, without requiring things that move. It also introduces a new thesis: Welby is sceptical of positing two ‘inscrutables’ – two unknown entities – instead of one. Like Armstrong, she would prefer to posit ‘interacting motions’ only, and not posit ‘ether’. This counts against reading Motion as ether, and in favour of reading Motion as energy.

On 21 February 1898, Armstrong’s nephew wrote to Welby, explaining that his uncle was too ill to reply personally. However, Armstrong wished to convey his thanks for her ‘extremely able’ letter, and that it gave him ‘a great pleasure to find that a lady could grasp so fully and with so much intelligence the nature of so recondite a subject’. Later, in a letter dated 21 March 1899, of which only a fragment survives, Armstrong sympathises with Welby’s ‘sad loss’ (presumably of her husband, who died on 26 November 1898) and adds, ‘from the tenor of your former admirable letter to me, I felt that there was a kindred intellectual link between us’. Welby clearly agreed.

To summarise, Welby’s metaphysic of Motion is drawn from Victorian vortex theories of matter, on which material bodies are motions. Welby’s universe is a swirling complex of motions – of energy. This is why, in a charming postcard to Schiller dated 15 November 1903, she describes leaves as follows: ‘the leaf and its fellows as ultimately aught but varieties of Energy’.Footnote ³⁷

6.1 Clifford, Lloyd Morgan, and Welby’s ‘Mind-Activity’

On Welby’s system, what is the place of mind in nature? I argue she is best read as a panpsychist (a reading which, as we shall see, confirms her idealism). The first two parts of this section show that, in 1890–1, Welby advocates a panpsychism akin to that of W. K. Clifford and Lloyd Morgan. Yet, complicating her position, Welby also conceives mind as a novelty exclusively belonging to a higher level of nature. The final part of this section considers Welby’s intellectual network with regard to these issues.

Let’s start by explaining the Victorian backdrop that Welby was working against. In Section 5, we saw that Stoney and Romanes were pushed towards panpsychism by their belief in the continuity of evolution. This belief is rooted in Reference DarwinDarwin’s (1859, 194) Origin of Species, which claimed ‘natural selection can act only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap’. Applying the maxim that nature cannot make jumps to humans, Reference DarwinDarwin’s (1871, 105) Descent of Man claimed that ‘the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind’. Even faculties such as ‘self-consciousness’, which seem ‘peculiar’ to humans, may be ‘incidental results of other highly advanced intellectual faculties’. Here, we will see that Darwinian faith in evolutionary continuity also motivates the panpsychisms of Clifford and Lloyd Morgan.

Clifford’s position emerges in his paper ‘On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves’, delivered in 1874 and published in Mind four years later. Affirming the continuity of evolution, Reference CliffordClifford (1878, 64) argues that evolution displays ‘a series of imperceptible steps connecting inorganic matter with ourselves’. It is ‘impossible’ to point out ‘any sudden break’ in these steps, driving us to admit that ‘every motion of matter is simultaneous with some … event which might be part of a consciousness’. In a rare and detailed study of Clifford’s metaphysics, Reference ManderMander (2020, 174) explains Clifford’s reasoning: if nature makes no jumps, mind-matter correlations must hold below the level at which you get self-aware (e.g. human) consciousness. Furthermore, all matter correlates to mind in some way – we have arrived at panpsychism. Clifford claims that every feeling is a ‘complex’, comprising elements of ‘Mind-stuff’:

For Clifford, a human consciousness is a complex with the properties of intelligence and volition, made up of mind-stuff elements which in themselves are not intelligent or wilful. He goes on to explain that matter is not merely correlated with mind-stuff, matter is identical with mind-stuff:

Our ‘imperfect representation’ of mind-stuff as matter is what we call the ‘material universe’. ‘On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves’ was reprinted in Clifford’s posthumous Reference 66Clifford, Stephen and Pollock1879 Lectures and Essays, edited by his friends Frederick Pollock and Leslie Stephen. In his introduction to these volumes, Reference Pollock, Stephen and PollockPollock (1879, 39) notes that as Clifford’s ultimate elements are mind, not matter, Clifford’s metaphysics must ‘be reckoned on the idealist side’: ‘To speak technically, it is an idealist monism.’Footnote ⁵²

Let’s move on to Lloyd Morgan, whose account of the mind changed significantly over the course of his career. Reference BlitzBlitz (1992, 59) identifies several phases in his thought, the earliest of which runs from 1882 to 1912. As Welby died in 1912, she did not have the chance to engage with the work he produced during later phases. Reference Lloyd MorganLloyd Morgan’s 1890 Animal Life and Intelligence sets out his early position in especial detail. In the final chapter, ‘Mental Evolution’, Reference Lloyd MorganLloyd Morgan (1890, 465–7) describes two kinds of phenomena. One is physical or physiological phenomena, which include ‘neuroses’: ‘molecular changes in the brain’. Physical phenomena are explained ‘in terms of energy’, so he labels them ‘kinetic’. The other kind of phenomena is mental or conscious, including ‘psychoses’: ‘states of consciousness’. He labels these mental phenomena ‘metakinetic’.

Lloyd Morgan argues that neuroses have evolved from ‘simpler modes of molecular motion’: complex neuroses have evolved from simpler neuroses, and simple neuroses have evolved from non-organic modes of motion. Crucially, psychoses have also evolved – from simpler modes of metakinesis: complex psychoses have evolved from simpler psychoses, and simple psychoses have evolved from non-conscious phenomena. Against mind-body dualism, he argues for monism:

In other words, kinetic phenomena (molecular brain activity) is identical with the metakinetic (states of consciousness). Lloyd Morgan uses this monism to explain how human consciousness has come about:

As energy forms ‘molecular processes in the human brain’, so also metakinesis forms ‘human consciousness’. Reference Lloyd MorganLloyd Morgan (1890, 468) goes on to explain that the kinetic and metakinenetic are ‘different phenomenal manifestations of the same noumenal series’. ‘Matter’ and ‘spirit’ are ‘merged’ in a substance which is ‘unknown … in itself’.Footnote ⁵³

Lloyd Morgan intermittently corresponded with Welby from 1888 to 1906; their 1890–1 correspondence is of especial interest to us. In a letter to Welby dated 17 July 1891, Lloyd Morgan sets out the monistic position given here, and describes metakinesis in more detail:

This is also a kind of panpsychism: every form of energy has a metakinetic aspect and, when that energy attains certain forms, consciousness appears. Interestingly, a portion of this letter was subsequently published verbatim as a short ‘Letter to the Editor’ in Nature on 6 August 1891; see Reference Lloyd MorganLloyd Morgan (1891). It is unclear which he authored first: the letter to Welby, or to Nature.

Like Stoney, Romanes, Clifford, and Lloyd Morgan, Welby defends the continuity of evolution with regard to mind. For example, in a letter to Lloyd Morgan dated 8 February 1890, Welby describes the evolution of the mind as ‘continuous’, and adds:

For Welby, our evolutionary ancestors include animals, plants, and the earth. Everything in the world shares a common nature. The last line of this passage hints at Welby’s frustration with theories of the mind that sharply demarcate the ‘inner’ mind from the ‘outer’ world, implicitly denying their common nature. Her reading notes of leading psychology books often make this critique. For example, her notes on Reference HoffdingHarald Hoffding’s 1891 Outlines of Psychology ask, ‘How did the original outside and inside – whether of a body or a nut – become sublimated into indicating the difference between matter and mind?’ She adds, ‘“Mental” life must be drawn without break from “organic” life and this again from “physical” nature.’Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, her notes on the very first page of Reference SullySully’s 1892 The Human Mind complain, ‘why here and in the following pages insert a superfluous in and out?’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Welby’s view that the evolution of mind is continuous powers her preference for panpsychism. In the same letter to Lloyd Morgan, dated 8 February 1890, she adds:

For Clifford, every molecule of inorganic matter possesses ‘a small piece of mind-stuff’. As molecules increase in complexity, sentience appears. In keeping with her broader metaphysics, Welby is saying she could accept this if the ‘stuff’ part of Clifford’s metaphysics were replaced by ‘activity’; this recalls her rejection, given in Section 3.3, of ‘stuff and nonsense’. On this position, presumably every individual motion within the dynamic system that is Motion possesses ‘Mind-activity’, but it is only when motions increase in complexity that sentience appears. I find confirmation of this reading in her later correspondence with Lloyd Morgan.

Having received Lloyd Morgan’s 17 July 1891 letter on metakinesis, Welby replies on 25 July 1891. Implicitly accepting the rest of his theory, she writes there is only one ‘real difficulty’ between us. To explain that difficulty, she quotes Lloyd Morgan, underlining the crucial first word of his thesis: ‘Every form of energy has its metakinetic aspect but only in certain forms (neurosis) does the metakinesis rise to the level of consciousness.’ Of this thesis, Welby writes, ‘All I want you to add is, “what we commonly call consciousness”.’ Otherwise, she explains, ‘finality and completeness in our self-analysis creeps in’ – we should not assume ‘we know all about “consciousness”’. As I read Welby, she fully agrees with Lloyd Morgan that every form of energy has its metakinetic aspect, but only in certain forms does it rise to the level of what we know as consciousness. She is allowing for forms of consciousness that we do not commonly label as such – for forms of consciousness currently unknown to us.

Further evidence of Welby’s openness to other forms of consciousness can be found in a letter she wrote to Norman Pearson on 20 October 1886:

This speculation also suggests that Welby’s panpsychism preceded her correspondence with Lloyd Morgan. Perhaps her position developed through her earlier study of W. K. Clifford. Lucy Reference CliffordClifford (1924, 102) remembers that, during her 1886 Switzerland trip with Welby, she ‘was very eager concerning my husband’s views’, and ‘had a copy of his Lectures and Essays with her, the margins already covered with notes’. Given her openness to unknown forms of life and consciousness, Welby would surely have welcomed one of the more unusual observations made in Electric Movement. Reference ArmstrongArmstrong (1897a, 49–50) observes that some of his photographs of ‘electric delineation on dust’ present ‘the appearance of organic forms’: ‘I have already spoken of electricity as organized motion, and we have here an example of it carried apparently to the very verge of life.’ For example, Armstrong notes that Figure 2 resembles biological cells, and Figure 3 resembles lichen. The thesis that Motion produces similar forms in both electricity and living creatures must surely have appealed to Welby.

Figure 2 & 3 Electricity resembling living forms. Taken from Reference ArmstrongArmstrong (1899, Plates 38 and 39).

These images are in the public domain; they are reproduced from a copy at Ushaw College, Durham, with permission of the Trustees of Ushaw College

Returning to Lloyd Morgan’s theory of metakinesis, in a letter dated 21 September 1891, Welby adds:

Again, Welby is suggesting here that as we do not know when metakinesis (pre-consciousness) develops into psychosis (states of consciousness), there may be forms of psychosis that as yet we are unaware. Perhaps there is consciousness on a scale ‘enormously below’ our perceptual range, such as on the scale of quartz fibres, which are measured in microns, one micron being one-thousandth of a millimetre. Alternatively, there may be consciousness on a scale ‘enormously … above’ our perceptual range – perhaps one that encompasses a planet or solar systems. Welby’s fascination with scale was long-standing. For example, in a 1882–5 letter to Julia Wedgwood, Welby (repr. in Reference CustCust, 1929, 98–9) stresses that ‘telescopes reveal more and more clearly the comparative minuteness of our planet and scale of life’.

Further confirmation that Welby accepts Lloyd Morgan’s theory can be found in her notes on Reference SullySully’s 1892 The Human Mind, which (having critiqued Sully’s position) set forth her own view on how our ‘primitive’ ancestors conceived the world:

For Welby, our ancestors rightly conceived the world as motions and energies – and included ourselves amongst those motions and energies. In so doing, they anticipated vortex theories of matter, and Lloyd Morgan’s metakinesis, on which pre-consciousness ‘which-may-develop-into-consciousness’ accompanies every form of energy. This thesis, that pre-consciousness or mind-activity pervades the universe, confirms Welby’s idealism.

6.2 Complicating Welby’s Panpsychism: Novelty in Nature

Although Welby holds a panpsychism akin to that defended by Clifford in 1878, and Lloyd Morgan in 1890, I argue there is a major difference between her position and theirs: Welby takes phenomena such as mind or consciousness to be really ‘new’ or novel. This difference emerges most clearly when we ask how many kinds of being there. As Reference BlitzBlitz (1992, 56) explains, many evolutionists who accepted the continuity of evolution defended some form of monism, on which there is just one kind of being. Monism was popular amongst the thinkers Welby engaged with. Clifford’s mind-stuff offers a kind of monism. Drawing on the work of his late friend Clifford, Reference RomanesRomanes (1885, 88–9) identifies mind with motion, arguing against ‘seeming duality’. In 1895, Lloyd Morgan edited a collection of Romanes’ posthumous essays, titling it Mind and Motion and Monism. On Reference Lloyd MorganLloyd Morgan’s 1890 system there is also only one kind of substance, of unknown nature; Reference BlitzBlitz (1992, 56) notes that Lloyd Morgan’s monism draws on that of Romanes.

In contrast, Welby rejects monism. In a letter to Hodgson dated 10 October 1890, Welby writes that she prefers a kind of ‘Triunism’ over ‘Dualism and even Monism’.Footnote ⁶² On her triunism, ‘the conception of Matter as the supreme Premiss’ is ‘replaced by that of Motion’. Presumably, the remaining, non-supreme elements of her triune would be matter and mind. (Hodgson dryly replies on 13 October 1890: ‘I cannot help being a little amused at your own “supreme Premiss – Motion” … Thomson only gets as far as Vortex.’Footnote ⁶³) Furthermore, in her unpublished essay, ‘A Significant Question’, dated 1903, Welby writes:

One element of this passage is familiar: Welby is arguing that Motion produces matter and mind. Another element is unfamiliar: Welby is arguing that matter and mind are ‘different’, and that their ‘secret’ lies in how ‘change of degree will issue in change of kind’. This unfamiliar element is important. Unfortunately, Welby does not explain her thesis that change of degree issues in change of kind, but I argue we should understand it as follows. I will set out my reading of Welby’s position, and contextualise the position I ascribe to her, before offering some texts that support it.

At the core of my reading is the idea that Welby was attempting to allow for genuine newness within her metaphysics. In the above passage, I read Welby as holding that changes in degrees of motion result in change of kind. When motion changes to one degree, it results in a new kind of being, matter; when it changes to another degree, it results in another new kind of being, mind. Similarly, you might hold that, as water changes in degree (becoming colder or hotter) it changes in kind (becoming ice, liquid, steam). It is always water, just as we are always Motion; yet small, incremental changes produce new kinds of being. To illustrate this idea, consider Figure 4. This 1894 graph charts the volume to temperature relationship for water in each of its three states, indicating breaks at the freezing and boiling points. On my reading, changes in degrees of motion produce analogous ‘breaks’ in Welby’s continuous world: at each break, a new, higher level phenomena appears. To better understand this, it will be helpful to compare my reading of Welby’s system with another system that also posits levels within reality: that of Samuel Reference AlexanderAlexander’s 1920 Space, Time, and Deity.

Figure 4 Illustrating ‘breaches of continuity in development’ through the production of ice, water, and steam. Taken from Reference Lloyd MorganLloyd Morgan (1894, 335).

This image is in the public domain; it is reproduced (with permission) from a copy in private ownership

Figure 5 illustrates the levels within Alexander’s metaphysics.Footnote ⁶⁵ At the bottom level is ‘Motion’, Reference AlexanderAlexander’s (1920, vol. 1, 61) label for ‘Space-Time’, ‘a system of motions’. Reference AlexanderAlexander (1920, vol. 1, xi) describes Motion as the ‘stuff of the world’. On his system, the whole universe comprises Motion, but it is only on the lowest level of reality that we find ‘pure Motion, before matter has been generated in it’. As indicated by the arrow in Figure 5, Alexander’s levels increase in complexity from bottom to top: pure Motion, the least complex, produces the increasingly complex matter, life, and mind. The narrowing of the pyramid from base to apex indicates relative scarcity of phenomena: the universe exhibits less life than matter, and even less mind.

Figure 5 Levels within Alexander’s metaphysics

There is a striking similarity between the metaphysics of Welby and Alexander: both place ‘Motion’ at the heart of their systems, and claim that Motion produces matter and mind. I do not wish to overstate this similarity: Alexander’s unique metaphysic of Motion differs in many ways from that of Welby.Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet, given this shared thesis, Alexander’s system makes an excellent foil for Welby’s. An instructive difference between them lies in how Alexander conceives new phenomena to appear at different levels within Motion: via the mechanism of ‘emergence’. It will be instructive to give a brief history of emergentism.

Let’s say you are an evolutionist who wishes to affirm the continuity of evolution with regard to mind, and avoid positing supernatural interventions; and allow that ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ is a genuinely novel phenomena, something that is found in human beings but not in rocks. Effectively, you are seeking a way out of Wallace’s dilemma. Blitz’s study of the development of evolutionary emergentism argues that, over the course of his career, Lloyd Morgan sought precisely that:

Reference BlitzBlitz (1992, 59–61) describes the earliest phase of Lloyd Morgan’s career as ‘pre-emergentist’. Figure 4 is actually taken from another of Lloyd Morgan’s pre-emergentist books, his Reference Lloyd Morgan1894 Introduction to Comparative Psychology. Here, Blitz argues that Lloyd Morgan came close to admitting that ‘something new’ could occur in evolution, just as during changes in state of water, but such phenomena ‘introduced a difficulty’ for his belief in Darwinian continuity. Of such breaches of continuity, Reference Lloyd MorganLloyd Morgan (1894, 338) wrote, ‘There does not appear to be a gradual and insensible change from the physical properties of the elements to the physical properties of the compound … at the critical moment of the constitution of the compound there seems to be a new departure’ (my emphasis). Perhaps Lloyd Morgan felt he had ceded too much ground to thinkers such as Wallace, who posited genuine novelties in nature because, in the second edition of An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, he added a new paragraph:

The problem is that, in the absence of further argument, Lloyd Morgan’s description of these breaches as ‘apparent’ and ‘merely incidental’ is unconvincing.

Reference BlitzBlitz (1992, 59) explains that during the middle phase of his career, from 1912 to 1915, Lloyd Morgan developed a theory of emergentism; from 1915 onwards until his death, he systematically defended that theory.Footnote ⁶⁷ On Blitz’s reading, it took Lloyd Morgan many years to develop emergentism because the process required synthesising several independent philosophical ideas. Of his later writings, Reference Lloyd MorganLloyd Morgan’s 1927 Emergent Evolution is especially comprehensive. In its opening pages, Reference Lloyd MorganLloyd Morgan (1927, 1–2) writes that when we consider the history of the world, we occasionally find ‘something genuinely new’, such as ‘the advent of life’, ‘mind’, and ‘reflective thought’. Contra the supernaturalists, he aims to treat these novelties ‘without invoking any extra-natural Power’. The mechanism of emergence allowed Lloyd Morgan and Alexander to escape Wallace’s dilemma. They claimed that, as matter becomes increasingly complex, genuinely novel properties can ‘emerge’, attaining a higher ontological level. Thus, novelties such as mind can emerge in nature without recourse to supernatural intervention.

To illustrate emergentism further, let’s return to Alexander. Space, Time, and Deity claims that, as motions become increasingly complex, new qualities emerge, resulting in the hierarchy of levels. In this way, Matter emerges from pure Motion, life emerges from matter, and mind emerges from life:

On my reading of Welby, she holds many of the claims made here. Material bodies are complexes of motions and, as motions become more complex, new qualities such as life and consciousness appear, attaining higher levels within reality.

Having set out this reading, I offer some textual evidence in support of it. In a few letters, Welby seems to conceive matter, life, and mind as ‘ascending’ levels in nature. Consider this 1885–6 letter to mathematician Mary Everest Boole:

I take this to mean that evolution exhibits no breaks, but we still need a ‘principle of levelling up’: a mechanism to explain the upward tendency within nature.

Next, consider this 1888–90 letter to McClure:

Here, Welby seems to be describing three levels: (i) the ‘inorganic’, including physical or chemical elements; (ii) the ‘organic’, which presumably includes plants and less-than-sentient animals; and (iii) ‘mind’. At each level, she writes that something new appears: the organic is ‘a new complex of the motions’ that we find in the inorganic, just as mind, ‘a new way’, is a new complex of the motions that we find in the organic. She returns to (what appear to be the same) three levels in a letter to Norman Pearson, dated 4 February 1890. Having urged Pearson not to stop using the ideas of ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, just because they were used in pre-scientific contexts, Welby adds:

Putting these texts together, I depict Welby’s account of reality in Figure 6; to stress the similarities I perceive between her system and Alexander’s, I also use a pyramidal scheme.Footnote ⁶⁹ On Figure 6, Motion gives rise to matter, matter gives rise to the organic, and the organic gives rise to mind. As Reference StoneStone (forthcoming) explains, Welby argued that Darwin’s Descent of Man was inappropriately titled – for Darwin’s aim was to document the ascent of man: ‘how humanity has emerged from lower animals rather than regressed back into their condition’.

Figure 6 Levels within Welby’s metaphysics

This brings us to my final piece of textual evidence: Welby’s notes on Hoffding’s Outlines of Psychology. In this book, Reference HoffdingHoffding (1891, 36–7) argues that ‘the plant’ and ‘the animal’ are different ‘types of life’. One difference between them is that, unlike the animal, the plant ‘uses up its energies wholly in the life of nutrition’, such as in growing. Nature prepares everything for it. In this regard, he claims that ‘the plant is like a foetus, it remains in the maternal bosom of nature, and has not made its way out to independent, individual life’. Welby’s notes reject Hoffding’s position, arguing there must be continuity between all types of life:

Against Hoffding, Welby claims the foetus is really like a plant: plant and animal life share ‘a common germ’, implying there is no ‘break’ between them. And yet, despite this continuity between plant and animal life, there is still a point where mind ‘comes in’. Importantly, this passage suggests a mechanism for the arrival of mind.

I do not find evidence that Welby explains the arrival of mind using emergence. In fact, I read this passage as offering an alternative to emergentism, via anabolic and catabolic processes. The anabolic process involves creating bigger, complex molecules from smaller, simpler molecules. In contrast, the catabolic process involves breaking down complex molecules, releasing energy for a body to use. Welby’s speculation seems to be that plants and human foetuses grow in the same way, except that in the foetus the anabolic process leads to a catabolic explosion, releasing energy that manifests as mind. To my mind, the details of this mechanism are unimportant – what matters is that she felt the need to offer one, to explain the arrival of novel phenomena within nature. I take this as evidence that Welby was also searching for a way out of Wallace’s dilemma. One part of her solution, that new phenomena appear on different levels of nature, is akin to the mature work of emergentists Lloyd Morgan and Alexander. Another part of her solution, that these new phenomena appear via anabolic-catabolic processes, differs from those emergentists: they are using different mechanisms to explain how those new phenomena appear.

Welby is a panpsychist, positing ‘mind-activity’ or metakinesis throughout nature. Yet, in my view, her panpsychism is complicated by her assertion that matter, life, and mind, are new phenomena. This leads her to reject the monism defended by panpsychists such as Clifford, Romanes, and Lloyd Morgan, in favour of a triune, levelled account of reality. Of course, these two theses are in tension. How can you hold that mind-activity floods the universe, an activity that is somehow continuous with mind; and that mind is a novelty only occurring on higher levels of reality? On my reading, Welby would respond as follows. Mind-activity is everywhere, yet mind-activity is merely a kind of pre-consciousness; only in rare forms, such as human beings, does it develop into sentience, and these forms represent breaks within the world. These ‘breaks’ are novel, yet not discontinuous with the rest of nature. Although plausible, this answer does not remove the tension altogether. Just as Lloyd Morgan struggled for years towards his theory of emergence, I read Welby as struggling towards her own account of mind.

6.3 Networking with Metaphysicians of Mind

The final part of this section reflects on the personal connections between Welby and some of the metaphysically minded thinkers named earlier in this Element. We have already seen that she was in touch with many people important to the late W. K. Clifford, including his wife Lucy, and his friends Romanes, Pollock, and Stephens. Welby may have met this circle through Lucy Clifford, who was well known for hosting salons: her regular visitors included Pollock and Stephens.Footnote ⁷¹ Lucy Reference CliffordClifford (1924, 102) remembers that, in 1886 Switzerland, Welby ‘asked … about many who were my friends’. Here, I show that Welby used her network to bring metaphysicians of mind together.

To give a pertinent example, on 2 December 1891 Welby invited Lodge to visit her at Easter, ‘in order to meet & compare notes with one or two other thinkers who like you are sounding the depths of life from the physical side’. She adds that other possible guests include Lloyd Morgan, Sully, Hodgson, and Romanes. Notably, all these thinkers had published on the nature of the mind, and its place in nature. On 7 December, Lodge accepted her invitation.Footnote ⁷² Welby’s Easter plans are soon afoot. In a letter to Hodgson dated 31 December 1891, Welby invites him to what has become a five-day ‘little gathering’:

On 4 January 1892, Hodgson accepted her invitation: ‘The detachment of lieges whom you have summoned is indeed a brilliant one … [an] intellectual feast.’ As best I can tell, this visit went ahead: on this and presumably many other occasions, Welby hosted a philosophical salon.

This gathering is of especial interest because it involves so many thinkers who wrote on the mind. Also note that Welby’s correspondence with Lloyd Morgan on panpsychism, set out in Section 6.1, took place just a few months earlier – from July to September 1891. Given this, it seems likely that Lloyd Morgan and Welby would have discussed the mind further at Denton, and I wonder whether, or how, their relationship affected the development of their views. We have seen that Welby agreed with much of Lloyd Morgan’s position, and there is evidence that Lloyd Morgan drew on her thought in at least one area. In a letter to Welby dated 12 July 1905, Schiller describes overhearing Lloyd Morgan give a talk using some of her phraseology and ideas: ‘I sat next to him at dinner afterwards & taxed him with it whereupon he owned up.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Of the synthesis that would eventually become Lloyd Morgan’s emergentism, Reference BlitzBlitz (1992, 88–90) claims that a key idea is that reality possesses strata, or levels; he argues that Lloyd Morgan borrowed this idea from Walter T. Marvin’s 1912 metaphysics. Welby does not appear anywhere in Blitz’s study of Lloyd Morgan’s development but I wonder if he might also have garnered this idea from her.

Although Welby did not make contact with Alexander until after Easter 1892 – her introductory letter is dated 16 May 1892 – they also corresponded, intermittently but at length, until 1911. I have not found any letters discussing Motion but they evidently met several times, raising the possibility they shared ideas about this element of their metaphysics in person. Charmingly, in a letter dated 22 June 1908, Welby writes to Alexander of his impending visit: ‘I defy you to bore me! Duneaves shall be fortified.’Footnote ⁷⁵

7.1 Introducing Welby’s Work on Time

Welby’s writings on time span her career. They include an essay ‘The Now’, published in her first Reference Welby1881 book Links and Clues; correspondence and unpublished essays from the 1880s onwards; and two papers in Mind, her Reference Welby1907 ‘Time as Derivative’, and Reference Welby1909 ‘Mr. McTaggart on the “Unreality of Time”’. Of these texts, ‘Time as Derivative’ is particularly important: at seventeen dense pages, it constitutes Welby’s lengthiest engagement with time; and, as I have so far discovered eleven drafts of the paper, she clearly cared deeply about its contents. As its title indicates, the paper argues that time is a derivative phenomenon. More specifically, that time derives from space.

Unlike the other topics considered in this study, Welby’s account of time, chiefly as presented in ‘Time as Derivative’, has been studied extensively.Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet, with the exception of my own work, the literature implies that Welby’s account of time is primarily concerned with language. For example, scholars have described ‘Time as Derivative’ as an ‘application of signific maxims’ to time, and as focused on ‘issues of interpretation’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In their detailed studies of Welby on time, Reference PetrilliPetrilli (2009, 388–403) and Reference LuisiLuisi (2013) also give this impression, partly because both consider Welby’s position, and ‘Time as Derivative’, through Reference WelbyWelby’s 1903–11 language-focused correspondence with Peirce. Against this trend, I have argued (Reference Thomas, Stone and MolandThomas, forthcoming b) that ‘Time as Derivative’ is primarily concerned with metaphysics – as advancing a theory of what time is.

This section builds on my earlier work, chronologically exploring the development of Welby’s views on time, further detailing my reading of her mature metaphysic, and placing that account within her broader system. As I read Welby, her early work only advances an account of the features of time, holding for example that all events or times comprise a co-existing whole. As her career progresses, she develops an additional, complementary position on the nature of time: that time is a kind of space. This position emerges full-blown in ‘Time as Derivative’ and, I argue, it constitutes an anti-realism about time.

7.2 Welby’s Block Universe (1881 Onwards)

As I read Welby, she ascribes certain features to time across almost her entire career. First, all times or events comprise a co-existing whole. Second, nothing is really past, present, or future. Third, the time series is multi-directional, permitting movement in multiple directions: although we usually think that times or events run from past to future, they may also run from future to past. The first two features commit Welby to a ‘block universe’. Reference DaintonBarry Dainton (2010, 7–9) describes such a universe as follows: ‘all moments of time (and all events) are equally real … differences between past, present and future are simply differences of perspective’. He compares block universes with solid chunks of marble, explaining that ‘the dynamic features of the universe, such as change and movement’, are ‘patterns running along the block’. Although block universe theories need not take time to be multi-directional, they often do, perhaps partly because of H. G. Wells’ infamous novel The Time Machine, which describes a time traveller moving backwards and forwards through time within a block universe.

Block universe theories were common in the late nineteenth century, and the term itself dates to 1880s.Footnote ⁷⁸ For example, Reference BradleyF. H. Bradley (1883, 53) describes a view on which ‘the past and future stretches in a block behind us and before us’. Reference JamesWilliam James (1884, 223) complains that certain views around timelessness are ‘just another way of whacking upon us the block-universe’. Drawing on Hegel, Reference McTaggartJ. M. E. McTaggart (1894, 192) defended a block universe theory: ‘reality is one timeless whole, in which all that appears successive is really co-existent, as the houses are coexistent which we see successively from the windows of a train’.

I read Welby as describing the features of time in (what I believe to be) her earliest writing on the subject, her Reference Welby1881 essay ‘The “Now”’:

From our earthly perspective, events are future, present, or past. Yet from God’s perspective, nothing is past, present, and future; everything is ‘changeless’, ‘solid’, and ‘immoveable’ – it simply ‘is’. God sees the world as it truly is, whilst we are usually prevented from seeing this by a ‘time-veil’ or ‘time barrier’. This passage describes events as co-existing, for all events exist changelessly; and it claims that nothing is really past, present, or future. Welby’s universe is a block.

New content added to the second, Reference Welby1883 edition of Links and Clues confirms this reading. In support of her claim that we are fettered by a time barrier, Reference WelbyWelby (1883, 158) quotes Augustine: we ‘fluttereth between the motions of things past and to come’, while ‘in the Eternal nothing passeth, but the whole is present’. Furthermore, she references a new, Reference Eberty1880 edition of Felix Eberty’s The Stars and the Earth: Or, Thoughts Upon Space, Time, and Eternity.Footnote ⁷⁹ Reference WelbyWelby (1883, 156) writes that this book ‘brings out with singular force the purely relative value of conditions of space and time … we are able easily to conceive changes in the present physical order of things, or rather in the point of view from which we regard them, which would entirely revolutionise our apparently most necessary notions of “past, present, future”’. In the book, Reference EbertyEberty (1880, 7) explains that light takes time to travel: we don’t see the moon as it is, but as it was about a second before. Depending on where we are, we can see places as they were at various times. Thus, he reasons, the events on earth of eight minutes ago can be seen from the sun, whilst the events on earth of 4,000 years ago can be seen from a faraway star. Reference EbertyEberty (1880, 11–12) argues this allows us to understand God’s omniscience via his omnipresence: ‘if we imagine the eye of God present at every point of space’, the world’s whole history ‘is at the present moment actually extended in space’. Welby doesn’t explain why she takes The Stars and the Earth to ‘revolutionise’ our ‘apparently’ necessary notions of past, present, and future. But presumably her reasoning is something like this: if the same event can be witnessed at different times from different points in space, it makes little sense to speak of that event as being past, present, or future. As on God’s perspective, each event simply is.

Evidence that Welby ascribes multi-directionality to time can be found a few years later, in her anonymously published 1885 dialogue, ‘An Echo of Larger Life’. Perhaps it was written with Eberty in mind, for the narrator recounts meeting a wise man who showed people ‘that their thought could travel in one instant to a distant star and over long ages of time’. The dialogue goes on to explain that those people:

To a person in London, ‘upwards’ refers to one direction. To a person at London’s antipode (i.e. its geographically opposite part of the planet) in the Pacific Ocean, ‘upwards’ refers to the reverse direction – to what is, from London’s perspective, ‘downwards’. Hence ‘upwards’ and ‘downwards’ have ‘no real existence in space’: they are relative to a person’s location. Eventually, the same people also discovered:

Welby is arguing that to a person at Time 1, ‘past’ refers to one direction; to a person at Time 2, ‘past’ refers to the reverse direction – to what is, from Time 1’s perspective, ‘future’. Time is multi-directional: it is a matter of perspective whether the time series runs past–future or future–past. This thesis anticipates a position advanced in Reference BradleyBradley’s 1893 Appearance and Reality, which considers our assumption that the time series has a single direction, from past to future. Against this assumption, Reference BradleyBradley (1893, 214) argues that ‘the direction, and the distinction between past and future, entirely depends upon our experience’.

Two years later, in a letter to Pollock dated 3–4 December 1887, Welby describes her position that all times are a co-existing whole in a different way:

This passage uses two related metaphors to make its point about time. One concerns Flatland: Welby is arguing that, like two-dimensional Flatlanders, we do not see the world as it really is. If we could see in a higher number of dimensions, we would see the past, present, and future together – we would see all times as a co-existing whole. The other metaphor concerns binocular vision. Animals with binocular vision, such as humans, integrate different information from two eyes to achieve depth of visual perception. In an 1887 manuscript on mental biology, Welby (repr. in Reference PetrilliPetrilli, 2009, 470–1) gives a technical explanation of binocular vision, then asks what would happen if mental development should follow physical vision ‘and become biune’ (i.e. two in one). She answers that using a ‘binocular’ faculty, our intellects could ‘detect’ third dimensions beyond the usual alternatives of discussion, giving us ‘a real depth of insight answering to depths of space … a thought-cube, instead of only points, lines, or plane surface-views’. If our mental vision became binocular, we could achieve more insight into the world – and, by implication, one insight would be that we live in a block universe.

In an unpublished essay ‘The Significs of Space and Time’, dated 9 August 1910, Welby suggests how one might visually represent her universe: ‘Let a circle symbolise space and let a row of dots in it represent, as a whole, Time; each dot representing a section or “spot” in Time, which does not “pass”; we “pass” our “time” in or on this or that way or path.’Footnote ⁸¹ I illustrate this prose description in Figure 7. Again, Welby is straightforwardly describing a block universe.

Figure 7 Time within Welby’s block universe

Before moving on, I add a note on Motion. As I read Welby, she finds ‘motion everywhere, motions underlying every phenomenon’. What we usually think of as the material universe is ‘Motion’, the dynamic system containing all smaller motions. Given this, Welby’s block universe theory is a theory about Motion. In other words, Motion is the block. Like an unchanging block of marble, Motion itself does not change, yet the striations or waves it contains comprise all the changes and movements of the universe. On this reading, Welby’s metaphysic of Motion once again prefigures that of Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity. As explained in Section 6.2, Reference AlexanderAlexander (1920, vol. 1, 61–2) also conceives the universe as ‘a system of motions … a single vast entity Motion’. He is explicit that this universe is a block. To illustrate, Reference AlexanderAlexander (1920, vol. 1, 64) explains that, on his universe, all the life stages of a ‘growing organism’ co-exist: its adolescence, maturity, and deterioration. Yet, because it contains all motion within itself, Reference AlexanderAlexander (1920, vol. 1, 64) describes Motion ‘as the theatre of perpetual movement’.Footnote ⁸² Welby and Alexander both place a huge stress on dynamism within their block universes.

7.3 Arriving at the Derivation of Time from Space (circa 1897)

Gradually, alongside Welby’s career-long views on the features of time, she also develops a new view regarding the nature of time: that it derives from space. This is the position she will eventually defend at length in ‘Time as Derivative’. Hints of this view appear in her late 1890s writings, and I have found that Welby herself acknowledges she was developing new ideas during this period. On a set of reading notes, Welby states, ‘Written in 1891, about 6 years before I discovered that time had no vocabulary.’Footnote ⁸³ As we will see, the thesis that time lacks a vocabulary of its own comprises a key premise in ‘Time Is Derivative’, so it seems likely that this 1897 realisation played a significant part in Welby’s decision to write the paper.

What prompted Welby’s ‘discovery’ that time has no vocabulary? She does not say, but I suggest it stemmed from her reflections on time–space parallelism. Welby’s unpublished papers include at least five copies of a table taken from Francis Bowen’s historical study, Modern Philosophy.Footnote ⁸⁴ Drawing on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Reference BowenBowen’s (1877, 179–81) table provides twenty-eight theses or parallels, showing ‘the curious parallelism and symmetry which exist between our notions of Space and Time’. To give a flavour of these parallels, I provide the first three:

Welby’s papers also include several copies of an alternative version of the table – authored by her. One copy is headed ‘1897-1900’, and titled “Paraphrase of a parallel definition of Time + Space (here reversed)”. Here, Welby gives her own twenty-eight parallels. Again, the first three provide a flavour:

Parallel (1) asserts the unity of space, and of that particular kind of space which we call Time – already hinting at the derivative nature of time. Parallel (2) asserts that the parts of space are co-existent; so too are the parts of time, which we would see if we did not suffer from a kind of blindness with regard to time (more on this blindness in Section 7.4). The question marks next to (3) show that Welby is still working through her ideas of space and time; but it is significant that, already, she states here that ‘Time is Space translated’. It seems likely that Welby’s reversal of Bowen’s table, reasoning from space to time, represents a significant advance towards the development of her mature view. As she claims to have realised that time lacks a vocabulary around 1897, and this table is dated 1897–1900, the timing would certainly fit.

A few years later, Welby began work on ‘Time as Derivative’. As best I can tell, she began planning the paper in 1901. In a letter to her assistant R. Greentree dated 31 August 1901, Welby writes that Pollock ‘was much interested in my “time” ideas’. In a letter to Schiller dated 22 September 1901, Welby writes, ‘I have somewhat developed the ideas of time.’ By 11 December 1901, she tells Schiller that she plans to treat the subject ‘separately’ (i.e. in a stand-alone piece).Footnote ⁸⁵ Of the eleven drafts I have found of this paper, what appears to be the earliest lies in an envelope labelled ‘TIME Paper 1902’.Footnote ⁸⁶ This aligns with the fact a draft of the paper was circulating in 1902. Welby may have sent a copy to George Stout: in a letter dated 6 January 1902, Welby writes, ‘I can’t help hoping that, though you could not adopt my view of space and time, you will allow that it is worth advancing?’.Footnote ⁸⁷ She certainly sent a draft to Scottish philosopher W. R. Sorley for, in a letter dated 23 October 1902, he explicitly comments on it.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although the structure of the paper, and the figures it engages with, changes across these drafts, I have found that its core theses remain consistent.

7.4 Welby’s Anti-Realist Metaphysic of Time (1900s)

Welby’s mature views on the nature of time appear full-blown in her Reference Welby1907 ‘Time as Derivative’. I read this paper as advancing a unique kind of anti-realism about time. To make this case, it will be helpful to give an overview of the paper. I distinguish (and label) five sections within it. §I (p. 383) comprises an introduction. §II (pp. 383–5) argues that our language, and ideas, of time derive from space. §III (pp. 385–93) discusses excerpts about time taken from recent literature. Welby argues that some of these excerpts misconceive time, whilst others implicitly support her view. §IV (pp. 393–9) considers the origin of our idea of time, and offers a new metaphysic. The conclusion, §V (pp. 399–400), summarises some of her points. My reading of Welby centres on §IV, but I will say a little about the other sections too.

The opening lines of §I state:

We should not ‘bracket’ space and time (i.e. treat them in parallel) for they are not equal categories. Space is primary, whilst time is not. Time is produced by our experience of Motion and Space. The rest of the paper expands on these ideas.

In §II, Reference WelbyWelby (1907, 383–4) claims that we ‘speak of’ feelings and ideas as ‘following each other’ in time, yet ‘to follow is a space-motion idea’. Similarly, we ‘speak of vast periods’, or a ‘short space’ of time – ‘all spatial ideas’. Time has ‘length’; we can speak of a ‘space of time but not of a time of space’. Welby stresses that her argument does not rely ‘wholly’ upon the etymology of single words, but instead on:

Welby is arguing that as all temporal language derives from spatial language, our idea of time must derive from our idea of space. More deeply, she is concerned with the ‘empirical source’ of these ideas.

We can flesh out this thesis by looking to the Welby–Peirce correspondence. In a letter dated 16 December 1904, Peirce (repr. in Reference HardwickHardwick, 1977, 47) comments on a draft of ‘Time as Derivative’ and poses an objection to it: even if Welby is right that temporal language depends on spatial language, this only proves time’s dependence on space ‘in speech’. Welby (repr. in Reference HardwickHardwick, 1977, 51) replies on 7 January 1905 that our lack of temporal vocabulary shows we lack ‘experience’ of time, and ‘for the best of reasons: that time is a product of space + motion – is in fact a kind of space’. Reference PetrilliPetrilli (2009, 393) helpfully characterises their exchange, explaining that, for Peirce, ‘linguistic usage did not offer proof of the derivative character of time’. But, for Welby, it did: she believed that ‘linguistic expression is indicative of the functioning of our mental categories and modelling of experience’. The linguistic dependence of time on space shows a conceptual dependence of time on space and, as our concepts are drawn from experience, this indicates that we lack experience of time.

Welby’s view that our language and concepts of time are drawn from space anticipates some twenty-first-century neuroscience. Reference BuonomanoBuonomano’s (2017, 179–94) discussion, ‘The Spatialization of Time in Neuroscience’, amasses evidence to show ‘that the brain itself spatializes time’: studies show children require a concept of space before they can understand time; we ‘often use spatial terms to talk about time’ such that English speakers ‘place the past behind us and the future in front’; and ‘Spatial metaphors are often used to talk about time, but temporal metaphors are rarely used to describe space.’ He even wonders if the brain’s spatialisation of time predisposes us towards a block universe theory, in which, as Reference BuonomanoBuonomano (2017, 12) puts it, ‘the past and future are as real as locations north and south of you’. Had this research existed in the early twentieth century, I have no doubt Welby would have cited it as support for her position.

Moving on, §IV of ‘Time is Derivative’ considers the empirical sources of our experience:

Above, it was implied that our idea of time lacks an empirical source; here, we are told that time itself has no existence in the sense that space does. This passage lays the foundation for my reading of ‘Time as Derivative’. All realisms about time, including ‘A-theory’ and ‘B-theory’, order events by before and after. Additionally, A-theorists order events by present, past, and future. Anti-realisms about time hold that nothing is before or after (and certainly not past, present, or future). As I read Welby, she offers full-blown anti-realism about time.

Unlike our idea of time, she holds that our idea of space does have an empirical source: our perception of space and motion, via change. ‘Change’, Reference WelbyWelby (1907, 396) writes, ‘seems to be the central or original experience’. At this point, it is helpful to recognise that, for Welby, all changes are motions. She makes this point clearly in an unpublished note titled ‘Motion’, dated July 1900:

If you think that all change is a kind of motion, then of course you would hold that, whenever we perceive change, we perceive motion.

§IV continues:

A little later, Reference WelbyWelby (1907, 398) distinguishes two ‘modes’ of motion or change in space: ‘the successive’ and ‘the simultaneous’. To illustrate, she writes that you can strike two musical notes ‘successively or simultaneously’. I read Welby as claiming that we experience two kinds of change: simultaneous variety or ‘diversity-in-position’, such as a garden holding many kinds of plants; and temporal succession or ‘change-of-position’, such as a sprout growing into a sapling. Simultaneous variety is obviously a kind of change over space: the flowers are red here, and yellow there. Yet as I understand Welby, temporal succession is also a kind of change over space: the tree is a sprout here, and a sapling there. Strictly speaking, there is no temporal succession – it’s just a ‘translation’ of simultaneous variety in space. But we have a ‘mental condition’ that prevents us from seeing the sprout and the bush spatially, as existing together. Welby’s blind man cannot see the simultaneous variety of a garden, or any ‘Space-scheme’, as the ‘one act’ it really is: he can only ‘touch’ each plant in succession. Similarly, we cannot see the life of a tree, or any ‘Time-scheme’, as the ‘one act’ it really is: we can only touch each moment of time in succession. For Reference WelbyWelby (1907, 397), our ‘mental blindness … creates the successive’. In effect, our mental blindness creates time.

Given Welby’s view that humans ‘erect’ past, present, and future, she is evidently not an A-theorist. Yet many of her claims are compatible with B-theory, which can be characterised more fully as follows:

On ‘typical’ B-theories, ours is a block universe: it is an existing whole, a spread-out manifold of events, and there is no privileged present. On my reading of ‘Time as Derivative’, Welby’s universe is a block, but it is not B-theorist. This is because, for Welby, our idea of time lacks an empirical source, and time does not exist outside our minds. Everything is really in space, but nothing is really in time. On this reading, there are two key differences between B-theory and Welby’s anti-realism.

One concerns the nature of the block manifold. For the B-theorist, the manifold is space-time: a leaf is green at one location in the manifold and red at another – and these locations are times. In contrast, Welby’s manifold is space, and its locations are spatial positions. I find confirmation of this in the way that Welby conceives the past and future as spatial locations. For example, in §V of ‘Time as Derivative’, Reference WelbyWelby (1907, 400) describes the past as ‘the world already explored by Man on his great journey through the life-country’, and the future as ‘that which is yet below a given horizon … the world waiting for him’. She is even more explicit in a letter to Peirce dated 20 November 1904:

For Welby, the ‘future’ is simply a spatial location, beyond her location. The years Reference Welby1907 and 2107 are not times separated by a temporal distance, but spaces separated by a spatial distance.

The other key difference concerns the temporal relations before and after. For the B-theorist, events really occur before or after each other. On my reading, Welby denies this. As she puts it in the passage immediately above, all time-words are non-temporal. For Welby, nothing really happens before or after, because time is merely spatial ‘diversity-in-position’. This is why Reference WelbyWelby (1907, 385) characterises before and after as spatial positions: ‘“before” is before a man in a place, on a spot, in Space, and “after” is what follows or remains behind him’. Her Reference Welby1909 paper makes this point exceptionally clearly:

For Welby, a leaf changes colour from August to September in exactly the same way different parts of a single leaf can be smooth and rough: change is diversity across space. For the B-theorist, a world without conscious beings would still be temporal. As Reference RussellBertrand Russell (1915, 212) once wrote, ‘In a world in which there was no experience there would be no past, present, or future, but there might well be earlier and later.’ In contrast, given her view that time is only a mind-dependent idea, I argue that for Welby a world without conscious beings would not be temporal. In comments on a draft of ‘Time as Derivative’, Welby’s friend William MacDonald puts her view exactly like this: ‘Before there was sentient being, there was matter extended and movable in space … but not in time, because … there was no Time until sentient being invented it.’Footnote ⁹⁰ This is not B-theory, but anti-realism.

To better understand this reading of Welby, it will be helpful to illustrate it. Consider Figure 8. Imagine these three squares are patches of ocean: one patch is calm and clear; another is darker; and the last, perhaps close to rocks, is rough and black. This is an example of simultaneous change: variation across space. Now imagine one patch of ocean, gradually darkening from daytime to dusk to midnight. This is an example of successive change: what we usually call change as across time. But, for Welby, this is simply another kind of change across space. It is difficult to represent successive change using still images, but late-nineteenth-century photographers developed ways of doing just that – and, I argue, Welby approved their spatial representations of what we usually call time.

Figure 8 Illustrating change across space, through patches of ocean

§IV of ‘Time as Derivative’ hints at how we could see the world, if not for our mental blindness with regards to time:

I’ll take these illustrations in reverse order. A group of musical notes can be played successively, say as an arpeggio; or simultaneously, as a chord. Welby is saying that we usually hear a symphony successively, yet, if we could perceive the world as it really is, we would hear it is as a single chord. Welby previously used the example of a chord in her 1897–1900 “Paraphrase of a parallel definition of Time + Space”. Meanwhile, the reference to photography we can ‘now’ do almost certainly refers to Victorian inventions such as 1860s ‘chronophotography’, which captured motion through successive images, such as Étienne-Jules Marey’s horses in Figure 9. Chronophotography arguably spatialises time, by portraying a temporal process (such as painting) as a spatial series. Welby’s personal papers include a 1904 Nature clipping about Rina Scott’s pioneering time-lapse photography of plants. Scott photographed plants growing across days or weeks, and showed their growth on screen across a few seconds. For example, Reference ScottScott (1903, 780) showed the flowers of Sparmannia Africana slowly unfurling. On her clipping, Welby notes, ‘Thus time can be telescoped or microscoped. But space, its source … cannot.’Footnote ⁹¹ Like Alice in Wonderland, time can be made longer or shorter, but space cannot.

Figure 9 ‘Arab horse at a gallop’.

Photograph by Jules Marey. This image is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%89tienne-Jules_Marey_-_Arab_Horse_Gallup_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)

Welby’s approval of photography demands a detour into the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson,Footnote ⁹² who famously rejected the spatialisation of time, and critiqued these photographic techniques. For example, in his 1889 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and Free Will), Reference BergsonBergson (1910, 98) critiques accounts of time that fall ‘back upon space … really giving up time’. Bergson’s 1907 L’Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution) argues that chronophotography, and the new art of cinematography, depict time spatially, and hence fail to capture the true nature of time. For example, Reference BergsonBergson (1911, 351) writes, ‘Of the gallop of a horse our eye perceives chiefly a characteristic, essential … form.’ In contrast, ‘instantaneous photography’ ‘spreads out’ the horse’s gallop, portraying mere ‘quantitative variations’. Bergson did not publish on photography before 1907,Footnote ⁹³ so Welby was probably unaware of his views when she wrote ‘Time as Derivative’; had she known, I imagine she would have rebutted them. For Welby, these kinds of photographs capture the truth: a horse’s motion is variation across space.

Given their dissenting views on the spatialisation of time, it is prima facie puzzling that §III of ‘Time as Derivative’ includes excerpts from Bergson’s Time and Free Will that Welby takes to support her position. She places these alongside excerpts from another French text, Jean-Marie Guyau’s 1890 La genèse de l’idée de temps (The Genesis of the Idea of Time). Reference WelbyWelby (1907, 392–3) notes that she became ‘acquainted’ with these texts after writing her paper, but they are important because ‘they are in a substantial agreement with its contention’. She quotes Bergson’s description of time as a ‘bastard concept’ (concept batard), resulting from the intrusion of an idea of space into consciousness. She also quotes Guyau’s description of time as a ‘simple effect of consciousness’ (simple effet de la donscience), and his thesis that language shows our idea of time to be the product of evolution (La philologie indique donc une evolution de l’idee de temps). The commonality Welby finds with Guyau’s position is obvious – and it suggests Welby endorses the thesis that we evolved our idea of time. But what is the commonality she finds with Bergson? I find Reference LovejoyLovejoy’s (1912, 527) analysis of Guyau and Bergson helpful here: he writes that they ‘reached at least one common conclusion … our ordinary notions of time are deeply infected with imagery derived from our experiences of space’. Lovejoy explains that they use this conclusion differently: Guyau takes it as a ‘clue’ regarding the spatial genesis of time perception, whereas Bergson argues that space-infected time is false time, and accordingly finds Guyau’s genesis theory ‘inadmissible’. Although Welby is ultimately on Guyau’s side, she shares Guyau and Bergson’s ‘common conclusion’. Our notion of time is deeply infected by space. And, for Welby, that is exactly as it should be: time is just a kind of space.

An advantage of my reading of Welby is that, I argue, it helps us makes sense of other 1900s texts within her corpus. For example, in a Reference Welby1903–5 letter to Edmund McClure, Welby (repr. in Reference CustCust, 1931, 131–2) writes that the ‘origin’ of time is ‘space-motion’: ‘The space of succession which we call “time” is of course as much space as the space of the simultaneous.’ For Welby, time is a kind of space. I find she makes the same point in a Reference Welby1903–5 letter to W. R. Sorley, in the context of discussing a draft of ‘Time as Derivative’. She states that, on her hypothesis:

On Welby’s account of time, time is a kind of succession in space. In a response to a worry Sorley raises, that any kind of succession assumes time, Welby replies that succession can be purely spatial: take the succession of trees on a hillside, or changes in colour within a painting. What we describe as succession in time is really succession ‘in space, its original home’. As Welby puts it in a note authored on 27 April Reference Welby1907, her 70th birthday: ‘70 years of what? Of life, experience … 70 years in what? Space’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Figure 7 illustrates Welby’s description of her block universe, taken from her unpublished 1910 essay ‘The Significs of Space and Time’. The essay uses her description to advance her spatial understanding of time:

This passage makes several claims. It reiterates Welby’s block universe theory: events in the past are no more lost to us than objects are in another part of space. It also states that space includes time, just as it includes its material contents; I argue this fits with my reading of time as a kind of space. Finally, this passage recognises that we are not ‘ideally and conceptually’ restricted to travelling forwards in time. I suspect this is a reference to stories about time travel, a subject to which we now turn.

7.5 The Victorian ‘Fourth Dimension’

To better understand what I take to be the main thesis of ‘Time as Derivative’, that time is a kind of space, I argue we should read it as growing out of Victorian debates around the ‘fourth dimension’. Section 3.2 described the fourth dimension as a dimension of space. In a wide variety of ways, some 1880s thinkers came to conceive the fourth dimension as time.Footnote ⁹⁶ For example, in a Nature article titled ‘Four-Dimensional Space’, a mysterious writer ‘S’ (1885, 481) explicitly considers ‘Time as a fourth dimension’: ‘Since this fourth dimension cannot be introduced into space, as commonly understood, we require a new kind of space for its existence, which we may call time-space.’ Wells’ The Time Machine popularised the notion that time is the fourth dimension, by having his time traveller explain:

For Wells’ (1895, 5) characters, this enables time travel: ‘admit that time is a spatial dimension … it becomes possible to travel about in time’. Reference ArthurArthur (2019, 40) helpfully explains Wells’ reasoning: a subject ‘moves in three dimensions of space and one of time’ but, ‘because the time dimension is really a spatial dimension of a different kind, the subject may move forward or back along this dimension at different rates’.

Welby was closely familiar with discourse around the fourth dimension, and with the thesis that it should be identified with time. In addition to Flatland, Welby owned at least two other books covering the fourth dimension: Reference HintonHinton’s 1888 New Era of Thought, and Reference SchofieldAlfred Taylor Schofield’s 1888 Another World; or, the Fourth Dimension.Footnote ⁹⁷ In a letter to Pollock dated 3–4 December 1887, she even states, ‘some years ago I passed through what might perhaps be called a Hinton phase’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Interestingly, Wells (cited in Reference RuddickRuddick, 2001, 243) wrote that Flatland ‘started’ him writing The Time Machine.

With regard to time as the fourth dimension, Reference WelbyWelby’s 1891 correspondence with Lodge is of especial interest. In 1891, Lodge gave an address, subsequently published in Nature:

Lodge’s ‘luminous’ idea, that events may be ‘existent always’, is of course the kind of block universe theory shared by Welby. In a letter to Lodge dated 22 September 1891, Welby recounts annotating his address ‘from end to end’, and her friends saying, ‘why, that is just what you have been trying for years to make us understand!’. In a reply dated 19 November 1891, Lodge restates his view, writing that ‘time’ is ‘like a 4th dimension of space being traversed by us at a perfectly constant pace’. Welby replies on 2 December 1891:

Linelanders perceive one dimension of space, yet there is more to space. We only perceive one dimension of time yet, Welby suggests, there is more to time. Picking up on Lodge’s suggestion, Welby speculates that our ‘Line-Land’ of time is, or is similar to, a fourth spatial dimension. Notably, this is the same letter in which Welby invites Lodge to visit Denton for her Easter 1892 gathering; she writes that they should particularly discuss his ‘memorable Address’. I argue this letter bears on the origins of Welby’s mature metaphysic in two ways: it contains (what I believe to be) her earliest suggestion that time may be a kind of space; and it is connected with discourse around the fourth dimension. I argue this discourse powers her mature account of time.

Welby even connects her mature account with time travel. In her first letter to Wells, dated 18 November 1897, Welby applauds his ‘inimitable’ Time Machine.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ They corresponded until 1910, and Wells probably visited her; one of Wells’ novels refers to ‘Lady Welby’s work upon Significs’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Frustratingly, their extant correspondence does not further discuss time or The Time Machine, but I wonder what Wells would have made of her metaphysic. Welby clearly felt an affinity between their views. In the published version of ‘Time as Derivative’, Reference WelbyWelby (1907, 400) concludes §V by stating we must explore new, future ‘continents’ of Time. But the 1902 draft adds:

Perhaps this conclusion did not make it into the published version because Welby worried that referencing science fiction might make her philosophy appear fanciful. Whatever happened to it, this draft conclusion provides further evidence that Welby’s account of time as a kind of space draws from Victorian fourth dimension discourse. An excised passage from The Time Machine states:

This passage would fit seamlessly into ‘Time as Derivative’. As I read her, Welby agrees with the likes of McTaggart that ‘reality is one timeless whole’, yet she reaches this conclusion via an alternative route – a fourth dimensional understanding of space. Welby has put a metaphysic to the Wellsian zeitgeist.