The fourth dimension

120 THE FOURTH DIMENSION

If the order and the law we see is due to the conditions of conscious experience, we must conceive nature as spontaneous, free, subject to no predication that we can devise, but, however apprehended, subject to our logic.

And our logic is simply spatiality in the general sense —that resultant of a selection of the permanent from the unpermanent, the ordered from the unordered, by the means of the group and its underlying duality.

We can predicate nothing about nature, only about the way in which we can apprehend nature. All that we can say is that all that which experience gives us will be conditioned as spatial, subject to our logic, Thus, in exploring the facts of geometry from the simplest logical relations to the properties of space of any number of dimensions, we are merely observing ourselves, becoming aware of the conditions under which we must perceive. Do any phenomena present themselves incapable of explanation under the assumption of the space we are dealing with, then we must habituate ourselves to the conception of a higher space, in order that our logic may be equal to the task before us,

We gain a repetition of the thought that came before, experimentally suggested. If the laws of the intellectual comprehension of nature are those derived from considering her as absolute chance, subject to no law saye that derived from a process of selection, then, perhaps, the order of nature requires different faculties from the intellectual to apprehend it. The source and origin of ideas may have to be sought elsewhere than in reasoning.

2The total outcome of the critique is to leaye the ordinary man just where he is, justified in his practical attitude towards nature, liberated from the fetters of his own mental representations.

The truth of a picture lies in its total effect. It is vain to seek information about the landscape from an examina-