The fourth dimension

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THE FIRST CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF FCUR SPACE 39

But apart from the pushing to the limit, as a relative principle this doctrine of Aristotle’s as to the relativity of substance is irrefragible in its logic. He was the first to show the necessity of that path of thought which when followed leads to a belief in a four-dimensional space.

Antagonistic as he was to Plato in his conception of the practical relation of reason to the world of phenomena, yet in one point he coincided with him. And in this he showed the candour of his intellect. He was more anxious to lose nothing than to explain everything. And that wherein so many have detected an inconsistency, an inability to free himself from the school of Plato, appears to us in connection with our enquiry as an instance of the acuteness of his observation. _For beyond all knowledge given by the senses Aristotle held that there is an active intelligence, a mind not the passive Tecipient of impressions from without, but an active and_ originative being, capable of grasping knowledge at_first_ hand, Im the active soul Aristotle recognised something | F in man not produced by his physical surroundings, some-|)/, > _¢ thing which creates, whose activity is a knowledge | underived from sense. This, he says, is the immortal and | undying being in man. :

Thus we see that Aristotle was not far from the recognition of the four-dimensional existence, both without and within man, and the process of adequately realising the higher dimensional figures to which we shall come subsequently is a simple reduction to practice 7 of his hypothesis of a soul. @ al =o

The next step in the unfolding of the drama of the recognition of the soul as connected with our scientific conception of the world, and, at the same time, the recognition of that higher of which a three-dimensional world presents the superficial appearance, took place many centuries later. If we pass over the intervening time