Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

CHAPTER VI
THE HIGHER WORLD
IT is indeed strange, the manner in which we must being
to think about the higher world.
Those simplest objects analogous to those which are
about us on every side in our daily experience such as a
door, a table, a wheel are remote and unrecognisable in the
world of four dimensions, while the abstract ideas of
rotation, stress and strain, elasticity into which analysis
resolves the familiar elements of our daily experience are
transferable and applicable with no difficulty whatever.
Thus we are in the unwonted position of being obliged
to contrast the daily and habitual experience of a fourdimensional
being, from a knowledge of the abstract
theories of the space, the matter, the motion of it;
instead of, as in our case, passing to the abstract theories
form the richness of sensible things.
What would be a wheel in four dimensions? What
the shafting for the transmission of power which a
four-dimensional being would use.
The four-dimensional wheel, and the four-dimensional
shafting are what will occupy us for these few pages. And
it is no futile or insignificant enquiry. For in the attempt
to penetrate into the nature of the higher, to grasp within
our ken that which transcends all analogies, because what
we know are merely partial views of it, the purely
material and physical path affords a means of approach
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