The fourth dimension

118 THE FOURTH DIMENSION

being, those that do survive will present such and such characteristics. This is the necessary beginning for ascertaining what kinds of organisms do come into existence. And so Kant’s hypothesis of a random consciousness is the necessary beginning for the rational investigation of consciousness as it is. His assumption supplies, as it were, the space in which we can observe the phenomena. It gives the general laws constitutive of any experience. If, on the assumption of absolute randomness in the constituents, such and such would be characteristic of the experience, then, whatever the constituents, these characteristics must be universally valid.

We will now proceed to examine more carefully the polograph, constructed for the purpose of exhibiting an illustration of Kant’s unity of apperception.

In order to show the derivation order out of non-order it has been necessary to assume a principle of dualitywe have had the axes and the posits on the axes—there are two sets of elements, each non-ordered, and it is in the reciprocal relation of them that the order, the definite system, originates.

Is there anything in our experience of the nature of a duality ?

There certainly are objects in our experience which have order and those which are incapable of order. The two roots of a quadratic equation have no order. No one ean tell which comes first. If a body rises vertically and then goes at right angles to its former course, no one can assign any priority to the direction of the north or to the east. There is no priority in directions of turning. We associate turnings with no order progressions in a line with order. But in the axes and points we have assumed above there is no such distinction. It is the same, whether we assume an order among the turnings, and no order among the points on the axes, or, vice versa, an order in