Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

SIGNIFICANCE OF A FOUR-DIMENSIONAL EXISTENCE 19
the images of insects, sometimes practised by children.
They put a few blots of ink in a straight line on a piece of
paper, fold the paper along the blots, and on opening it the
lifelike presentiment of an insect is obtained. If we were
to find a multitude of these figures, we should conclude
that they had originated from a process of folding over;
the chances against this kind of reduplication of parts
is too great to admit of the assumption that they had
been formed in any other way.
The production of the symmetrical forms of organised
beings, though not of course due to a turning over of
bodies of any appreciable size in four-dimensional space,
can well be imagined as due to a disposition in that
manner of the smallest living particles from which they
are built up. Thus, not only electricity, but life, and the
processes by which we think and feel, must be attributed
to that region of magnitude in which four-dimensional
movements take place.
I do not mean, however, that life can be explained as
a four-dimensional movement. It seems to me that the
whole bias of thought, which tends to explain the
phenomena of life and volition, as due to matter and
motion in some peculiar relation, is adopted rather in the
interests of the explicability of things than with any
regard to probability.
Of course, if we could show that life were a phenomenon
of motion, we should be able to explain a great deal that is
at present obscure. But there are two great difficulties in
the way. It would be necessary to show that in a germ
capable of developing into a living being, there were
modifications of structure capable of determining in the
developed germ all the characteristics of its form, and not
only this, but of determining those of all the descendants
of such a form in an infinite series. Such a complexity of
mechanical relations, undeniable though it be, cannot