Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

34
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
things to a region of perfect certainty, where it beholds
what is, not the scattered reflections; beholds the sun, not
the glitter on the sands; true being, not chance opinion.
Now, this is to us, as it was to Aristotle, absolutely
inconceivable from a scientific point of view. We can
understand that a being is known in the fulness of his
relations; it is in his relations to his circumstances that
a man’s character is known; it is in his acts under his
conditions that his character exists. We cannot grasp or
conceive any principle of individuation apart from the
fulness of the relations to the surroundings.
But suppose now that Plato is talking about the higher
man—the four-dimensional being that is limited in our
external experience to a three-dimensional world. Do not
his words being to have a meaning? Such a being
would have a consciousness of motion which is not as
the motion he can see with the eyes of the body. He,
in his own being, knows a reality to which the outward
matter of this too solid earth is flimsy superficiality. He
too knows a mode of being, the fulness of relations, in
which can only be represented in the limited world of
sense, as the painter unsubstantially portrays the depths
of woodland, plains, and air. Thinking of such a being
in man, was not Plato’s line well divided?
It is noteworthy that, if Plato omitted his doctrine of
the independent origin of ideas, he would present exactly
the four-dimensional argument; a real thing as we think
it is an idea. A plane being’s idea of a square object is
the idea of an abstraction, namely a geometrical square.
Similarly our idea of a solid thing is an abstraction, for in
our idea there is not the four-dimensional thickness which
is necessary, however slight, to give reality. The argument
would then run, as a shadow is to a solid object, so
is the solid object to the reality. Thus A and B would
be identified.