The fourth dimension

28 THE FOURTH DIMENSION

Transferring our conceptions to those of an existence in a higher dimensionality traversed by a space of consciousness, we have an illustration of a thought which has found frequent and varied expression. When, however, we ask ourselves what degree of truth there lies in it, we must admit that, as far as we can see, it is merely symbolical. The true path in the investigation of a higher dimensionality lies in another direction.

The significance of the Parmenidean doctrine ee in this that here, as again and again, we find that those conceptions which man introduces of himself, which he does not derive from the mere record of his outward experience, have a striking and significant correspondence to the conception of a physical existence in a world of a higher space. How close we come to Parmenides’ thought by this manner of representation it is impossible to say. What I want to point out is the adequateness of the illustration, not only to give a static model of his doctrine, but one capable as it were, of a plastic modification into a correspondence into kindred forms of thought. Either one of two things must be true—that four-dimensional conceptions give a wonderful power of representing the thought of the East, or that the thinkers of the East must have been looking at and regarding four-dimensional existence.

Coming now to the main stream of thought we must dwell in some detail on Pythagoras, not because of his direct relation to the subject, but because of his relation to investigators who came later.

Pythagoras invented the two-way counting. Let us represent the single-way counting by the posits aa, ab, ac, ad, using these pairs of letters instead of the numbers 1, 2,3, 4. I put an @ in each case first for a reason which will immediately appear.

We have a sequence and order. There is no conception of distance necessarily involved. The difference