Some of the best science fiction has been written beyond the bounds of space opera and futuristic tales.  A great exemplar of this notion, both in his imaginative work and in his literary meditations,  is Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote an essay, “The Creation and P.H. Gosse,” a brief commentary on one of his favorite themes—a long forgotten and obscure writer.[1]  In this case the subject is Philip Henry Gosse, once perhaps the most famous anti-evolutionary zoologist in England, respected Fellow of the Royal Society and author of graceful books on marine biology of the English South Coast.  Gosse’s name has been preserved since the height of his fame (or notoriety) in the 1850s by the loving critical portrait drawn by his son Edmund in a classic study, Father and Son (1907).[2]

P.H. Gosse is known today, at best, as a teeny footnote in the history of science and of Victorian culture.  Further, he is likely to be recalled as a distinctly comic footnote—the man who “wrote a book about Adam’s navel!”  This is one of the reductionist epigrams which often constitute history.  Gosse wrote an earnest geological-biological-philosophical-theological treatise called Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, published in 1857, at the apex of ferment over paleontological speculation in England.  It was not really “a book about Adam’s navel,” although the primal umbilicus did figure as an example and metaphor in Gosse’s argument.  Actually, as Borges noted, Gosse was making a subtle philosophical argument about time, reality and perception.  While, as Gosse’s son Edmund testifies, Philip’s motives for the argument were rooted in an extreme Protestant fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture, his thinking was intricate and paradoxical, and the whole issue is probably more sophisticated and interesting than Gosse himself recognized.

The point of view and assumptions Gosse began with are described by Edmund Gosse in characterizing his mother and father as devout Plymouth Brethren:
                         For her, and for my Father, nothing was symbolic, nothing allegorical
                       or allusive in any part of Scripture, except what was, in so many words,
                       proffered as a parable or a picture.  Pushing this to its extreme limit, and
                       allowing nothing for the changes of scene or time or race, my parents
                       read injunctions to the Corinthian converts without any suspicion that
                       what was apposite in dealing with half-breed Achaian colonists of the
                       first century might not exactly apply to respectable English men
                       and women of the nineteenth.  (F & S, 57-58)
Edmund’s analysis of his father’s religious belief is important.  He saw it, first, as the family “recreation”:
                           My Father was in the habit of saying, in later years, that no small
                        element of his wedded happiness had been the fact that my Mother and
                        he were of one mind in the interpretation of Sacred Prophecy.  Looking
                        back, it appears to me that this unusual mental exercise was almost their
                        only relaxation, and that in their economy it took the place which is
                        taken, in profaner families, by cards or the piano.  It was a distraction . . .
                        (F & S, 59)
Second, he recognized that religion for Philip Henry Gosse was an intellectual and philosophical activity—a stress wholly on faith, not on works:
                           His aspirations were individual and metaphysical.  At the present hour,
                        so complete is the revolution which has overturned the Puritanism
                        of which he was perhaps the latest surviving type, that all classes of
                        religious persons combine in placing philanthropic activity, the
                        objective attitude,  in the foremost.  (F & S, 237)
With this characterization of the author, Edmund also summarizes his father’s work in Omphalos:
                           It was, very briefly, that there had been no gradual modification of the
                        surface of the earth, or solo development of organic forms, but that when
                        the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly,
                        the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed.

                          The theory, coarsely enough, and to my Father’s great indignation, was
                        defined by a hasty press as being this—that God hid the fossils in the
                        rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity. In truth, it was the
                        logical and inevitable conclusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of
                        a sudden act of creation; it emphasized the fact that any breach in the
                        circular course of nature could be conceived of only in the supposition
                        that the object created bore false witness to past processes, which had
                        never taken place.  For instance, Adam would certainly possess hair and
                        teeth and bones in a condition which it must have taken many years to
                        accomplish, yet he was created full-grown yesterday.  He would display
                        an “omphalos,” yet no umbilical cord had ever attached him to a mother.
                        (F & S, 86-87)
This gives us P.H. Gosse and his controversial theory as his peers—and his own son—viewed him.

Edmund’s brisk explanation of his father’s theory makes it sound more offhand and lunatic than it was.  In fact, it was an interesting piece of speculation, casuistically inspired by P.H. Gosse’s determination to force geological evidence to fit his personal reading of Genesis, but nonetheless an intriguing hypothesis.  Several elements comprise Gosse’s theory:  1) God’s creation (as described Biblically) was an instantaneous, catastrophic (in the sense of all-embracing and traumatic) event which established the universe as a compete, ongoing mechanism, totally developed (and hence non-evolutionary), with a past and future established and integral to it; 2) natural life operates on a circular or cyclical basis (by implication, time is also thus circular rather than linear); 3) there is no objective way to measure or calculate the effects or passages of time, since the miraculous event of creation establishes two orders of phenomena—those that are “prochronic” (before time) and those that are “diachronic” (within time), and these phenomena are indistinguishable through human observation.  In a simplified version, Gosse saw this kind of cycle defining all life-forms:

His argument was that the moment of creation would occur within this cycle, and thus the newly-created forms would have inherent all the characteristics of the cycle’s passage.  Genesis indicates that Adam (along with the beasts of the earth) was created adult, but he would still have a (never-functional) navel, because navels are inherent in placental mammals after birth.  Each creature would possess the “standard equipment” of the species, even though some were not used.  So, also, with the rest of creation:  the universe was created as an ongoing concern, thus there were fossils of animals that never lived lying in the geological strata, along with all the apparatus for a total prehistory of the earth.

As Wayne C. Booth noted, this is a paradoxical, irrefutable argument, like one of Zeno’s simple and maddening paradoxes.  It can be asserted but not proved, since it supposes that we cannot distinguish between prochronic and diachronic artifacts, and it cannot be disproved, either, since all evidence must be either prochronic or diachronic.  In dealing with modes of rhetoric, Booth describes Gosse’s logic:
                        . . . he argued that the world had indeed been created all at once,
                        about 4004 B.C., but that of course it had been created with all of the
                        geological strata and fossil records that it would have had if it had
                        evolved through endless time.  At the moment of creation everything
                        had to be in order for a going universe, right down to faecal matter in
                        Adam’s colon.  Now there is simply nothing in logic or in empirical
                        science that could ever refute that position.  It cannot be falsified, but
                        neither can the scientific belief that it was designed to combat.  Those
                        who say that Gosse violates the law of parsimony, that to invent the
                        hypothesis of such a whimsical God is to complicate the world rather
                        than explain it.  But every man prefers his own way of applying
                        Ockham’s razor, and it is clear that no theory of evolution has ever been
                        as simple and efficient as Gosse’s, judged from his own point of view.
                        With it he can account for any future scientific discovery about his
                        world, while his opponents must go on debating about missing links.
                        If scientists really believed only what they can state in falsifiable form,
                        that would test Gosse’s views as against their own anti-catastrophism.  Or
                        they would have felt driven to show that Fosse’s theory was in fact
                        untestable and therefore meaningless. [3]

This is the first basic connection to note between Gosse’s ideas and the methods of speculative science fiction, where extrapolation from contemporary evidence and development of a consistent world-system from a single hypothetical instant (like creation in Genesis) are normal modes of thought.  Authors play God as part of their creative processes.

Borges seized on the speculative aspect of P.H. Gosse’s thesis, which is a mind-boggler if pressed toward its farthest paradoxical form.  He points out that Gosse has, in effect, abolished time in his thinking—or at least rearranged its significance.  Borges pushes Gosse’s idea of the instantaneous, catastrophic creation further and  notes that with this hypothesis creation could have occurred at any time—not the 6000+ years ago Gosse accepted (evidently from Bishop Ussher’s notorious calculation of 4004 B.C. as the exact date of creation).  If prochronic and diachronic phenomena are indistinguishable, you and I and the universe could have sprung into being a few seconds ago, complete with built-in past memories, histories, etc.  It is the kind of elastic solipsistic mind-maze Borges (and Philip K. Dick!) delighted in exploring:
                        . . . Gosse imagines a rigorously causal, infinite time that has been
                        interrupted by a past act:  the Creation.  State n will inevitably produce
                        state v, but before v the Universal Judgment may occur; state n pre-
                        supposes state c, but state c has not occurred, because the world was
                        created at f or h.  The first instant of time coincides with the instant of
                        the Creation, as St. Augustine says; the first instant tolerates not only
                        an infinite future, but an infinite past.  A past that is hypothetical, to be
                        sure, but also precise and inevitable . . . . The principle of reason requires
                        that no result be without a cause, and those causes require other causes,
                        which are multiplied regressively; there are concrete vestiges of them
                        all, but only those that are posterior to the Creation have really existed.
                        There are glyptodont skeletons in the gorge of Luján, but glyptodonts
                        never existed.  That is the ingenious (and, above all, incredible) thesis
                        that Philip Henry Gosse proposed to religion and to science. [4]

Linear, continuous time is eradicated in  this perspective.  We no longer have the simple, consistent Ussherite view of human history:  Creation­­­ (4004 B.C.) -----  B.C./A.D. ---- 2008 A.D.  Instead, we have Gosse’s closed cycle, a diagram of the mind of God, an amphisbaenic paradigm:

Everything prior to creation is prefigured exactly, and everything after creation is predicted exactly, in a static, nonevolving manner.  We can inspect everything that has been—which was created simultaneously at the instant of creation.  Borges paraphrases Gosse’s root idea:  “. . . one instant of time was inconceivable without another instant before it and another after it and so on to infinity.” [5]  In effect, Gosse believes only one instant has and will exist:  the moment of creation.  And in it, all infinity is prefigured.  In this instant of catastrophic creation, all past and future time is encapsulated.  This is possibly the ultimate expression of one branch of fundamentalist thought, a nihilism of frozen, unchanging reality, a literally timeless cosmos.

Gosse’s extraordinary thesis was prompted by the dilemma in which he found himself.  As an astute and conscientious scientist by the standards of his age, he was fascinated by the direction in which biology and geology moved in the late 1850s.  Evidence—apparently objective phenomena—piled up as geologists unearthed more fossil species and as biologists like Darwin and Wallace discovered evolutionary patterns in species.  Gosse admitted only two possible interpretations of this evidence:  “Looking at nature, or looking at it only with the lights of experience and reason, I see not how it is possible to avoid one of these two theories, the development of all organic existence out of gaseous elements, or the eternity of matter in its present forms.”[6]  He chose the static-nature concept, which jibed with his literal reading of Scripture.

This cyclical-static vision is, of course, wholly deterministic. It recalls the cosmos of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels,[7]  which takes in all time from the beginning of the universe to its destruction.  Everything—all time—coexists, and events are totally predicted, whether prochronic or diachronic, since time is either a wheel (in one expression) or a single instant which contains all other instants, as a seed contains the future life of an organism.  Gosse accepted this deterministic (or fatalistic) vision placidly:
                           This, then, is the order of all organic nature.  When once we are
                        in any portion of the course, we find ourselves running in a circular
                        groove, as endless as the course of a blind horse in a mill.  It is evident
                        that there is no one point in the history of any single creature, which
                        is a legitimate beginning of existence.  And this is not the law of some
                        particular species, but of all:  it pervades all classes of animals, all
                        classes of plants, from the queenly palm down to the protococcus, from
                        the monad up to man:  the life of every organic being is whirling in a
                        ceaseless circle, to which one knows not how to assign any commence-
                        ment.  (Omphalos, 122)
He makes the transition from species to cosmos by a simple analogical jump, which focuses everything within the mind of God:
                           It is certain that, when the Omnipotent God proposed to create a given
                        organism, the course of that organism was present to his idea, as an ever
                        revolving circle, and gave it thus an arbitrary beginning; but one which
                        involved all  previous rotations of the circle, though only as an ideal,
                        or, in another phrase, prochronic.  Is it not possible—I do not ask
                        for more—that, in like manner, the natural course of the world was
                        projected in His ideas as a perfect whole, and that He determined to
                        create it at some point of that course, which act, however, should
                        involve previous stages, though only ideal or prochronic?  (Omphalos,
                        344-45)
Then he makes a statement, anticipating the charges which would bring most ridicule down on him—that God, thus viewed, is like a confidence man “salting” a worthless gold mine to sell it to a gullible rube.  The fossils were “planted” to deceive us into believing we possess a prehistory:
                           It may be objected, that, to assume the world to have been created with
                        fossil skeletons in its crust,—skeletons of animals which never really
                        existed,—is to charge  the Creator with forming objects whose sole
                        purpose was merely to deceive us?  The reply is obvious.  Were
                        the concentric timber-rings of a created tree formed merely to deceive us?
                        Were the growth lines of a created shell intended to deceive us?  Was the
                        navel of the created man intended to deceive him into the persuasion that
                        he had a parent?  (Omphalos, 347-48)
There is something touching about Gosse’s Creator:  a good old fellow who is keeping us busy speculating about our origins by inventing a whole world with a past, like a novelist or playwright inventing an “other world.”   His God is a scenario-writer, playing with the Logos.  And, in fact, this “literary” quality in Gosse’s scheme makes it doubly intriguing—it is the keynote which the sensitive Borges sniffed out.  For the imaginative process P.H. Gosse followed is very much like that of a science fiction writer or fabulist—he has invented a universe and developed a consistent logic for it.  Gosse, without prideful self-consciousness, has cast himself as the Creator here, saying in effect “Let’s see—what would I do if I were Jaweh?”  The result is a powerful speculative fiction, as carefully developed as any of Borges himself.

P.H. Gosse’s contributions to nineteenth-century science were limited.  He wrote a series of important but soon-superseded texts on marine biology, and his eccentric treatise against evolution, Omphalos, was smothered in the greater debate between the giants of the age, such as Darwin and Lord Wallace.[8]  But the philosophical and literary ideas he raised quite incidentally in Omphalos are the stuff of which speculative fiction is made.  What Gosse finally described was the operation of a benign Creator, a personal God he imagined, and the treatise is clearly an exercise in empathetic drama:  this is how God must have planned and executed the construction of reality, our ineluctable universe.  It is interesting to wonder what he might have made of William Blake, had they coincided in time and met one another.

Gosse, as member of the Plymouth Brethren, rejected the idea of fiction as frivolous untruth.  Edmund Gosse recorded his parents’ objections to the feigned reality of fiction:  “No fiction of any kind, religious or secular, was admitted to the house.  In this it was to my Mother, not to my Father, that the prohibition was due.  She had a remarkable, I confess to me still somewhat unaccountable impression that to ‘tell a story,’ that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any kind, was a sin.”  (F & S, 24)  Yet P.H. Gosse had some knowledge of “moral” or “uplifting” writers like Sir Walter Scott, and young Edmund, after the stringent severity of his childhood, eventually followed a remarkable career as a man of letters.  In the autobiographical passages of Father and Son, Edmund records how his childish imagination developed in him a propensity for primitive magic, doubtless a corollary for the vivid religiosity of his family:
                           I persuaded myself that, if I could only discover the proper words to say
                        or the proper passes to make, I could induce the gorgeous birds and
                        butterflies in my Father’s illustrated manuals to come to life, and fly
                        out of the book, leaving holes behind them . . . .  During morning and
                        evening prayers, which were extremely lengthy and fatiguing, I fancied
                        that one of my two selves could flit up, and sit clinging to the cornice,
                        and look down on my other self and the rest of us, if only I could find the
                        key.  (F & S, 38)
This longing for magical powers and explanations of reality developed in other forms:  “My great desire was to walk out over the sea as far as I could, and then lie flat on it, face downwards, and peer into the depths.  I was tormented with this ambition, and, like many grown-up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me.” (F & S, 83)

This kind of magic-oriented fantasy is another symptom, perhaps of the chiliastic, Scripture-centered beliefs the Gosses held.  Their faith focused on Revelations as well as Genesis, on beliefs in the imminent end of the world and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.  The fantastic imagery of millenarian prophecy is akin to the vivid metaphors of speculative fiction, the creation of Utopias or “secondary worlds,’ in the terms of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.[9]  Thus, P.H. Gosse’s discovery of the theory of catastrophic instant creation and the distinction between prochronic and diachronic phenomena is not so bizarre as it might seem.  The abolition of mortality and time is one of the effects of the end of the world, and Gosse was projecting this idea backward to the creation, so that last things are inherent in first things, Alpha and Omega, the world eventually cyclical, as he saw it.

Gosse’s attempt to reconcile geological evidence (which he unearthed and catalogued as the new railroad cuts of the 1950s opened the British countryside) with a stable view of reality sub specie aeternitatis contained in the Bible led him not so much to casuistry as to imaginative empathy.  Omphalos does not depend on intricate scholastic argumentation but on a leap of faith, a vision as complete as that of William Blake in his prophetic books.  Blake, as a poet and printmaker, could develop his vision concretely, and he also stressed the illusory nature of this world, the lying “mundane egg,” and the primacy of imagination.  He developed a total mythic encyclopedia to explain the world, where Gosse turned only to Genesis and his own acute observations of biology.  But there is a kinship bewteen the two visionaries in their reliance on faith—spiritualized imagination—and their determination to see the world as a seamless whole—“the world in a grain of sand.”

The paradoxical aspect of P.H. Gosse’s theory, which intrigued Borges, would not have seemed miraculous but inevitable to Gosse’s mind.  The imagination which admits of God’s perpetual intervention in the course of nature as chronicled in Scripture would not view the abolition of time as extraordinary.  The temporal, finite world—whose evidence Gosse studied and detailed lovingly as a scrupulous zoologist—is but a manifestation of the encompassing mind of God, and the working out of his fixed, determined plan is written for us in all phenomena around us.  The bridge between traditional Christian faith and its literal interpretation and speculative literature is narrower than it may seem (as the works of the Inklings and other theological fabulists show, also).  P.H. Gosse’s Omphalos deserves recognition as a singularly interesting exercise in speculation, as a means of reconciling the imagination with the deceptive appearances of existence.

Edmund Gosse judged his father’s infatuations harshly from his own stance as a late-Victorian emancipated liberal:
                        . . . he was not a philosopher; he was incapable, by temperament and
                        education, of forming broad generalizations and of escaping in a vast
                        survey from the troublesome pettiness of detail.  He saw everything
                        through a lens, nothing in the immensity of nature.  Certain senses
                        were absent in him; I think that, with all his justice, he had no concep-
                        tion of the importance of liberty; with all his intelligence, the boundaries
                        of the atmosphere in which his mind could think at all were always
                        close about him; with all his faith in the Word of God, he had no
                        confidence; and with all his passionate piety, he habitually mistook
                        fear for love. (F & S 109)
Yet there is an imaginative breadth and power in P.H. Gosse’s argument which makes it worth reading as more than a curiosity of nineteenth-century thought.  Along with the free-wheeling fables of Swift, Diderot, Blake, Twain, Verne and others, it is a precursor of today’s speculative fiction. ###