The fourth dimension

APPENDIX IL 251

knowledge of it, the whole question of its actual relation to us, as we are, is left in abeyance. 5

Possibly a new apprehension of nature may come to us through the practical, as distinguished from the mathematical and formal, study of four dimensions. As a child handles and examines the objects with which he comes in contact, so we can mentally handle and examine fourdimensional objects. The point to be determined is this. Do we find something cognate and natural to our faculties, or are we merely building up an artificial presentation of a scheme only formally possible, conceivable, but which has no real connection with any existing or possible experience ?

This, it seems to me, is a question which can only be settled by actually trying. This practical attempt is the logical and direct continuation of the experiment Plato devised in the “ Meno.”

Why do we think true? Why, by our processes of thought, can we predict what will happen, and correctly conjecture the constitution of the things around us? This is a problem which every modern philosopher has considered, and of which Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, to name a few, have given memorable solutions. Plato was the first to suggest it. And as he had the unique position of being the first devisor of the problem, so his solution is the most unique. Later philosophers have talked about consciousness and its laws, sensations, categories. But Plato never used such words. Consciousness apart from a conscious being meant nothing to him. His was always an objective search. He made man’s intuitions the basis of a new kind of natural history.

In a few simple words Plato puts us in an attitude with regard to psychic phenomena—the mind—the ego“what we are,” which is analogous to the attitude scientific men of the present day have with regard to the phenomena