The fourth dimension

62 THE FOURTH DIMENSION

pursuing which we are in less likelihood of error than if we use the more frequently trodden path of framing conceptions which in their elevation and beauty seem to us ideally perfect.

For where we are concerned with our own thoughts, the development of our own ideals, we are as it were on a curve, moving at any moment in a direction of tangency. Whither we go, what we set up and exalt as perfect, represents not the true trend of the curve, but our own direction at the present—a tendency conditioned by the past, and by a vital energy of motion essential but only true when perpetually modified. That eternal corrector of our aspirations and ideals, the material universe draws sublimely away from the simplest things we can touch or handle to the infinite depths of starry space, in one and all uninfluenced by what we think or feel, presenting unmoved fact to which, think it good or think it evil, we can but conform, yet out of all that impassivity with a reference to something beyond our individual hopes and fears supporting us and giving us our being.

And to this great being we come with the question: “You, too, what is your higher ?”

Or to put it in a form which will leave our conclusions in the shape of no barren formula, and attacking the problem on its most assailable side: ‘“ What is the wheel and the shafting of the four-dimensional mechanic?”

In entering on this enquiry we must make a plan of procedure. The method which I shall adopt is to trace | out the steps of reasoning by which a being confined to movement in a two-dimensional world could arrive at a conception of our turning and rotation, and then to apply an analogous process to the consideration of the higher movements. ‘The plane being must be imagined as no abstract figure, but as a real body possessing all three