Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

36
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
relation to fact, so Aristotle, in discussing the philosophy
of Greece as he found it, asks, above all other things:
“Does this represent the world? In this system is there
an adequate presentation of what is?”
He finds them all defective, some for the very reasons
which we esteem them most highly, as when he criticises
the Atomic theory for its reduction of all change to motion.
But in the lofty march of his reason he never loses sight
of the whole; and that wherein our views differ from his
lies not so much in a superiority of our point of view, as
in the fact which he himself enunciates—that it is impossible
for one principle to be valid in all branches of
enquiry. The conceptions of one method of investigation
are not those of another; and our divergence lies in our
exclusive attention to the conceptions useful in one way
of apprehending nature rather than in any possibility we
find in our theories of giving a view of the whole transcending
that of Aristotle.
He takes account of everything; he does not separate
matter and the manifestation of matter; he fires all
together in a conception of a vast world process in
which everything takes part—the motion of a grain of
dust, the unfolding of a leaf, the ordered motion of the
spheres in heaven—all are parts of one whole which
he will not separate into dead matter and adventitious
modifications.
And just as our theories, as representations of actuality,
fall before his unequalled grasp of fact, so the doctrine
of ideas fell. It is not an adequate account of exist-
ence, as Plato himself shows in his “Parmenides”;
it only explains things by putting their doubles beside
them.
For his own part Aristotle invented a great marching
definition which, with a kind of power of its own, cleaves
its way through phenomena to limiting conceptions on