The fourth dimension

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32 THE FOURTH DIMENSION

not the same meaning to them which it has for us. Let us but imagine for a moment that material things are fleeting, disappearing, and_we shall enter with a far better appreciation into that search rch for the permanent which, with the Greeks, as with us, is the primary intellectual demand.

~ What is that which amid a thousand forms is ever the same, which we can recognise under all its vicissitudes, of which the diverse phenomena are the appearances ?

To think that this is number is not so very wide of the mark. With an intellectual apprehension which far outran the evidences for its application, the atomists asserted that there were everlasting material particles, which, by their union, produced all the varying forms and states of bodies, But in view of the observed facts of nature as then known, Aristotle, with perfect reason, refused to accept this hypothesis.

He expressly states that there is a change of quality, and that the change due to motion is only one of the possible modes of change.

With no permanent material world about us, with the fleeting, the unpermanent, all around we should, I think, be ready to follow Pythagoras in his identification of number with that principle which subsists amidst all changes, which in multitudinous forms we apprehend immanent in the changing and disappearing substance of things.

And from the numerical idealism of Pythagoras there

’ is but a step to the more rich and full idealism of Plato.

That which is apprehended by the sense of touch we put as primary and real, and the other senses we say are merely concerned with appearances. But Plato took them all as valid, as giving qualities of existence. That the qualities were not permanent in the world as given to the senses forced him to attribute to them a different