The fourth dimension

36 THE FOURTH DIMENSION

relation to fact, so Aristotle, in discussing the philosophy of Greece as he found it, asks, above all other things: “ Does this represent the world? In this system is there an adequate presentation of what is?”

He finds them all defective, some for the very reasons which we esteem them most highly, as when he criticises the Atomic theory for its reduction of all change to motion. But in the lofty march of his reason he never loses sight of the whole; and that wherein our views differ from his lies not so much in a superiority of our point of view, as in the fact which he himself enunciates—that it is impossible for one principle to be valid in all branches of enquiry. The conceptions of one method of investigation are not those of another; and our divergence lies in our exclusive attention to the conceptions useful in one way of apprehending nature rather than in any possibility we find in our theories of giving a view of the whole transcending that of Aristotle,

He takes account of everything; he does not separate matter and the manifestation of matter; he fires all together in a conception of a vast world process in which everything takes part—the motion of a grain of dust, the unfolding of a leaf, the ordered motion of the spheres in heaven—all are parts of one whole which he will not separate into dead matter and adventitious modifications.

And just as our theories, as representative of actuality, fall before his unequalled grasp of fact, so the doctrine of ideas fell. It is not an adequate account of existence, as Plato himself shows in his “ Parmenides” ; it only explains things by putting their doubles beside them.

For his own part Aristotle invented a great marching definition which, with a kind of power of its own, cleaves its way through phenomena to limiting conceptions on