A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

The truth is, that the discovery of matter’s identity with energy—and of its consequent lack of vital intrinsic difference from empty space—is an absolute coup de grace to the primitive and irresponsible myth of ‘spirit’. For matter, it appears, really is exactly what ‘spirit’ was always supposed to be. Thus it is proved that wandering energy always has a detectable form—that if it doesn’t take the form of waves or electron-streams, it becomes matter itself; and that the absence of matter or any other detectable energy-form indicates not the presence of spirit, but the absence of anything whatever

.⁴

This entire letter must be read to appreciate Lovecraft’s admirable reconcilation of Einstein and materialism. I have no doubt that he derived much of his data from contemporary literature on the subject—perhaps in the form of magazine or newspaper articles— but the vigour of his writing argues for a reasoned synthesis that is surely his own.

Lovecraft had a little more difficulty with quantum theory, which affects Elliot’s first principle, and which Lovecraft seems to have absorbed around this time. Quantum theory asserts that the action of certain sub-atomic particles is inherently random, so that we can only establish statistical averages of how a given reaction will turn out. Lovecraft addresses quantum theory significantly, to my knowledge, only once in his correspondence—in a letter to Long in late 1930:

What most physicists take the quantum theory, at present, to mean, is not that any cosmic uncertainty exists as to which of several courses a given reaction will take; but that in certain instances no conceivable channel of information can ever tell human beings which courses will be taken

, or by what exact course a certain observed result came about.⁵

It is clear from this that Lovecraft is merely repeating the views of experts. The point he is trying to establish is that the ‘uncertainty’ of quantum theory is not ontological but epistemological

; that it is only our inability (an inherent inability, not merely some deficiency in our sense-perception or general reasoning capacity) to predict the behaviour of sub-atomic particles that results in uncertainty. This conclusion—although accepted by Einstein in his celebrated dictum ‘God does not play dice with the cosmos’—appears to be wrong. Bertrand Russell has declared that the ‘absence of complete determinism is not due to any incompleteness in the theory, but is a genuine characteristic of small-scale occurrences’;⁶ although he goes on to say that atomic and molecular reactions are still largely deterministic.

And yet, in the late 1920s and early 1930s quantum theory was hailed as shattering the first of Elliot’s materialistic principles—the uniformity of law—just as relativity was thought to have shattered, or at least qualified, the second and third. We now know—in so far as we really know the ultimate ramifications of quantum theory— that the uniformity of law is itself only qualified, and perhaps not even in a way that has any philosophical significance. The relation between quantum theory and, say, the possibility of free will is anything but clear, and there is as yet no reason to carry the effects of quantum theory into the behaviour of macrocosmic phenomena.

Some of the most bracing pages in Lovecraft’s letters of this period deal with his emphatic assertion of atheism against those of his colleagues (especially Frank Long) who felt that the ‘uncertainty’ revealed by modern astrophysics left room for the recrudescence of conventional religious belief. Lovecraft was well aware that he was living in a time of both social and intellectual ferment; but he had nothing but contempt for those thinkers who were using the relativity and quantum theories to resurrect old-time belief: