Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

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THE FOURTH DIMENSION
pursuing which we are in less likelihood of error than if
we use the more frequently trodden path of framing
conceptions which in their elevation and beauty seem to
us ideally perfect.
For where we are concerned with our own thoughts, the
development of our own ideals, we are as it were on a
curve, moving at any moment in a direction of tangency.
Whither we go, what we set up and exalt as perfect,
represents not the true tread of the curve, but our own
direction at the present—a tendency conditioned by the
past, and by a vital energy of motion essential but
only true when perpetually modified. That eternal corrector
of our aspirations and ideals, the material universe
draws sublimely away from the simplest things we can
touch or handle to the infinite depths of starry space,
in one and all uninfluenced by what we think or feel,
presenting unmoved fact to which, think it good or
think it evil, we can but conform, yet out of all that
impassivity with a reference to something beyond our
individual hopes and fears supporting us and giving us
our being.
And to this great being we come with the question:
“You, too, what is your higher?”
Or to put it in a form which will leave our conclusions in
the shape of no barren formula, and attacking the problem
on its most assailable side: “What is the wheel and the
shafting of the four-dimensional mechanic?”
In entering on this enquiry we must make a plan of
procedure. The method which I shall adopt is to trace
out the steps of reasoning by which a being confined
to movement in a two-dimensional world could arrive at a
conception of our turning and rotation, and then to apply
an analogous process to the consideration of the higher
movements. The plane being must be imagined as no
abstract figure, but as a real body possessing all three