The fourth dimension

CHAPTER VI THE HIGHER WORLD

Ir is indeed strange, the manner in which we must begin to think about the higher world.

Those simplest objects analogous to those which are about us on every side in our daily experience such as a door, a table, a wheel are remote and uncognisable in the world of four dimensions, while the abstract ideas of rotation, stress and strain, elasticity into which analysis resolves the familiar elements of our daily experience are transferable and applicable with no difficulty whatever. Thus we are in the unwonted position of being obliged to construct the daily and habitual experience of a fourdimensional being, from a knowledge of the abstract theories of the space, the matter, the motion of it; instead of, as in our case, passing to the abstract theories from the richness of sensible things.

What would a wheel be in four dimensions? What the shafting for the transmission of power which a four-dimensional being would use.

The four-dimensional wheel, and the four-dimensional shafting are what will occupy us for these few pages. And it is no futile or insignificant enquiry. For in the attempt to penetrate into the nature of the higher, to grasp within our ken that which transcends all analogies, because what we know are merely partial views of it, the purely

material and physical path affords a means of approach 61