Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

THE FIRST CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF FOUR SPACE 39
But apart from the pushing to the limit, as a relative
principle this doctrine of Aristotle’s as to the relativity of
substance is irrefragible in its logic. He was the first to
show the necessity of that path of thought which when
followed leads to a belief in a four-dimensional space.
Antagonistic as he was to Plato in his conception
of the practical relation of reason to the world of
phenomena, yet in one point he coincided with him.
And in this he showed the candour of his intellect. He
was more anxious to lose nothing than to explain everything.
And that wherein so many have detected an
inconsistency, an inability to free himself from the school
of Plato, appears to us in connection with our enquiry
as an instance of the acuteness of his observation. For
beyond all knowledge given by the senses Aristotle held
that there is an active intelligence, a mind not the passive
recipient of impressions from without, but an active and
originative being, capable of grasping knowledge at first
hand. In the active soul Aristotle recognised something
in man not produced by his physical surroundings, something
which creates, whose activity is a knowledge
underived from sense. This, he says, is the immortal and
undying being in man.
Thus we see that Aristotle was not far from the
recognition of the four-dimensional existence, both
without and within man, and the process of adequately
realising the higher dimensional figures to which we
shall come subsequently is a simple reduction to practice
of his hypothesis of a soul.
The next step in the unfolding of the drama of the
recognition of the soul as connected with out scientific
conception of the world, and, at the same time, the
recognition of that higher of which a three-dimensional
world presents the superficial appearance, took place many
centuries later. If we pass over the intervening time