FOUR-DIMENSIONALVISTAS

by

Claude Bragdon

[Illustration]

New York

 "_Perception has a destiny_. " _Emerson_. 

INTRODUCTION

There are two notable emancipations of the mind from the tyranny ofmere appearances that have received scant attention save frommathematicians and theoretical physicists. 

In 1823 Bolyai declared with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom ofparallels, "I will draw two lines through a given point, both ofwhich will be parallel to a given line. " The drawing of these linesled to the concept of the curvature of space, and this to the ideaof _higher_ space. 

The recently developed Theory of Relativity has compelled therevision of the time concept as used in classical physics. Oneresult of this has been to introduce the notion of _curved_ time. 

These two ideas, of curved time and higher space, by their verynature are bound to profoundly modify human thought. They loosen thebonds within which advancing knowledge has increasingly labored, they lighten the dark abysses of consciousness, they reconcile thediscoveries of Western workers with the inspirations of Easterndreamers; but best of all, they open vistas, they offer "glimpsesthat may make us less forlorn. "

CONTENTS

I. THE QUEST OF FREEDOM

The Undiscovered Country--Miracles--The Failure of Common Sense--TheFunction of Science--Mathematics--Intuition--Our Sense of Space--TheSubjectivity of Space--The Need of an Enlarged Space-Concept. 

II. THE DIMENSIONAL LADDER

Learning to Think in Terms of Spaces--From the Cosmos to theCorpuscle--And Beyond--Evolution as Space-Conquest--DimensionalSequences--Man the Geometer--Higher, and Highest, Space. 

III. PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

Looking for the Greater in the Less--Symmetry--Other AlliedPhenomena--Isomerism--The Orbital Motion of Spheres: Cell-Subdivision--The Electric Current--The Greater Universe--A Hint from Astronomy--Gravitation--The Ether of Space. 

IV. TRANSCENDENTAL PHYSICS

Zöllner--Apparitions--Possession--Clairvoyance in Space--Clairvoyancein Time--Pisgah Sights of Life's Pageant. 

V. CURVED TIME

Time from the Standpoint of Experiment and of Conscious Experience--Relativity--The Spoon-Man--The Orbital Movement of Time--Materialitythe Mirror of Consciousness--Periodicity. 

VI. SLEEP AND DREAMS

Sleep--Dreams--Time in Dreams--The Eastern Teaching in regard to Sleepand Dreams--Space in Dreams--The Phenomenon of Pause. 

VII. THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The Field of Psychic Research--Modifying the Past--Karma andReincarnation--Colonel De Rochas' Experiments. 

VIII. THE EASTERN TEACHING

Oriental Physics and Metaphysics--The Self-Recovered Memory of pastBirths--Release. 

IX. THE MYSTICS

Hermes Trismegistus--The Page and the Press--The Ship and itsCaptain--Direct Vision--Plato's Shadow-Watchers--Swedenborg--Man, the Space-Eater--The Within and Without--Intuition and Reason--TheCoil of Life. 

X. GENIUS

Immanence--Timelessness--Beyond Good and Evil: Beauty--The Daemonic--"A Dream and a Forgetting"--The Play of Brahm. 

XI. THE GIFT OF FREEDOM

Concept and Conduct--Selflessness--Humility--Solidarity--Live Openly--Non-Resistance to Evil--The Immanent Divine. 

FOUR-DIMENSIONAL VISTAS

I THE QUEST OF FREEDOM

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Expectancy of freedom is the dominant note of to-day. Amid the crashof armies and the clash of systems we await some liberating strokewhich shall release us from the old dreary thralldoms. As Nietzschesays, "It would seem as though we had before us, as a reward for allour toils, a country still undiscovered, the horizons of which noone has yet seen, a beyond to every country and every refuge of theideal that man has ever known, a world so overflowing with beauty, strangeness, doubt, terror and divinity, that both our curiosity andour lust of possession are frantic with eagerness. "

Should a name be demanded for this home of freedom, there are thosewho would unhesitatingly call it _The Fourth Dimension of Space_. For such readers as may be ignorant of the amazing content of thisseemingly meaningless phrase, any summary attempt at enlightenmentwill lead only to deeper mystification. To the question, where andwhat is the fourth dimension, the answer must be, it is here--in us, and all about us--in a direction toward which we can never pointbecause at right angles to all the directions that we know. Ourspace cannot contain it, because it contains our space. No wallsseparate us from this demesne, not even the walls of our fleshlyprison; yet we may not enter, even though we are already "there. " Itis the place of dreams, of living dead men: it is _At the Back ofthe North Wind_ and _Behind the Looking Glass_. 

So might one go on, piling figure upon figure and paradox uponparadox, to little profit. The effective method is the ordered anddeliberate one; therefore the author asks of his reader theendurance of his curiosity pending certain necessary preparations ofthe mind. 

MIRACLES

Could one of our aviators have landed in ancient Athens, doubtlesshe would have been given a place in the Greek Pantheon, for the oldidea of a demigod was a man with wings. Why, then, does a flying manso little amaze us? Because we know about engines, and the smell ofgasoline has dulled our sense of the sublime. The living voice of adead man leaves us unterrified if only we can be sure that it comesfrom a phonograph; but let that voice speak to us out of vacancy andwe fall a prey to the same order of alarm that is felt by a savageat the report of a gun that he has never seen. 

This illustration very well defines the nature of a miracle: it is amanifestation of power new to experience, and counter to the currentthought of the time, Miracles are therefore always in order, theyalways happen. It is nothing that the sober facts of to-day are moremarvellous than the fictions of Baron Munchausen, so long as weunderstand them: it is everything that phenomena are multiplying, that we are unable to understand. This increasing pressure uponconsciousness _from a new direction_ has created a need to foundbelief on something firmer than a bottomless gullibility of mind. This book is aimed to meet that need by giving the mind the freedomof new spaces; but before it can even begin to do so, the readermust be brought to see the fallacy of attempting to measure thelimits of the possible by that faculty known as common sense. And bycommon sense is meant, not the appeal to abstract reason, but toconcrete experience. 

THE FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE

Common sense had scarce had its laugh at Bell, and its shout of"I told you so!" at poor Langley, when lo! the telephone became theworld's nervous system, and aeroplanes began to multiply like summerflies. To common sense the alchemist's dream of transmuting leadinto gold seems preposterous, yet in a hundred laboratories radiumis breaking down into helium, and the new chemistry bids fair toturn the time-honored jeer at the alchemists completely upside down. A wife whose mind was oriented in the new direction effectuallysilenced her husband's ridicule of what he called her credulity byreminding him that when wireless telegraphy was first suggested hehad exclaimed, "Ah, that, you know, is one of the things that is notpossible!" He was betrayed by his common sense. 

The lessons such things teach us are summed up in the reply of Arago, the great savant, to the wife of Daguerre. She asked him if hethought her husband was losing his mind because he was trying tomake permanent the image in a mirror. Arago is said to have answered, "He who, outside of pure mathematics, says a thing is impossible, speaks without reason. "

Common sense neither leads nor lags, but is ever limited to thepassing moment: the common knowledge of to-day was the mystery andenchantment of the day before yesterday, and will be the merecommonplace of the day after to-morrow. If common sense can solittle anticipate the ordinary and orderly advancement of humanknowledge, it is still less able to take that leap into the darkwhich is demanded of it now. The course of wisdom is therefore toplace reliance upon reason and intuition, leaving to common sensethe task of guiding the routine affairs of life, and guiding thesealone. 

THE FUNCTION OF SCIENCE

In enlisting the aid of reason in our quest for freedom, we shall befollowing in the footsteps of mathematicians and theoreticalphysicists. In their arduous and unflinching search after truth theyhave attained to a conception of the background of phenomena of fargreater breadth and grandeur than that of the average religionist ofto-day. As a mathematician once remarked to a neo-theosophist, "Your idea of the ether is a more material one than the materialist'sown. " Science has, however, imposed upon itself its own limitations, and in this connection these should be clearly understood. 

Science is that knowledge which can be gained by exact observationand correct thinking. If science makes use of any methods but theseit ceases to be itself. Science has therefore nothing to do withmorals: it gives the suicide his pistol, the surgeon his life-savinglance, but neither admonishes nor judges them. It has nothing to dowith emotion: it exposes the chemistry of a tear, the mechanism oflaughter; but of sorrow and happiness it has naught to say. It hasnothing to do with beauty: it traces the movements of the stars, andtells of their constitution; but the fact of their singing together, and that "such harmony is in immortal souls, " it leaves to poet andphilosopher. The timbre, loudness, pitch, of musical tones, is aconcern of science; but for this a Beethoven symphony is no betterthan the latest ragtime air from the music halls. In brief, sciencedeals only with _phenomena_, and its gift to man is power over hismaterial environment. 

MATHEMATICS

The gift of pure mathematics, on the other hand, is primarily to themind and spirit: the fact that man uses it to get himself out of hisphysical predicaments is more or less by the way. Consider for amoment this paradox. Mathematics, the very thing common sense swearsby and dotes on, contradicts common sense at every turn. Commonsense balks at the idea of _less than nothing_; yet the _minus_quantity, which in one sense is less than nothing in that somethingmust be added to it to make it equal to nothing, is a conceptwithout which algebra would have to come to a full stop. Again, thescience of quaternions, or more generally, a vector analysis inwhich the progress of electrical science is essentially involved, embraces (explicitly or implicitly) the extensive use of _imaginary_or _impossible_ quantities of the earlier algebraists. The verywords "imaginary" and "impossible" are eloquent of the defeat ofcommon sense in dealing with concepts with which it cannotpractically dispense, for even the negative or imaginary solutionsof imaginary quantities almost invariably have some physicalsignificance. A similar statement might also be made with regard to_transcendental_ functions. 

Mathematics, then, opens up ever new horizons, and its achievementsduring the past one hundred years give to thought the very freedomit seeks. But if science is dispassionate, mathematics is even moreaustere and impersonal. It cares not for teeming worlds and heartsinsurgent, so long as in the pure clarity of space, relationshipsexist. Indeed, it requires neither time nor space, number norquantity. As the mathematician approaches the limits alreadyachieved by study, the colder and thinner becomes the air and thefewer the contacts with the affairs of every day. The Prometheanfire of pure mathematics is perhaps the greatest of all in man'scatalogue of gifts; but it is not most itself, but least so, when, immersed in the manifoldness of phenomenal life, it is made to servepurely utilitarian ends. 

INTUITION

Common sense, immersed in the mere business of living, knows no moreabout life than a fish knows about water. The play of reason uponphenomena dissects life, and translates it in terms of inertia. Thepure logic of mathematics ignores life and disdains its limitations, leading away into cold, free regions of its own. Now our desire forfreedom is not to vibrate in a vacuum, but to live more abundantly. _Intuition_ deals with life directly, and introduces us intolife's own domain: it is related to reason as flame is related toheat. All of the great discoveries in science, all of the greatsolutions in mathematics, have been the result of a _flash_ ofintuition, after long brooding in the mind. _Intuition illumines_. Intuition is therefore the light which must guide us into thatundiscovered country conceded by mathematics, questioned by science, denied by common sense--_The Fourth Dimension of Space_. 

OUR SENSE OF SPACE

Space has been defined as "room to move about. " Let us accord tothis definition the utmost liberty of interpretation. Let usconceive of space not alone as room to move ponderable bodies in, but as room to think, to feel, to strike out in unimaginabledirections, to overtake felicities and knowledges unguessed byexperience and preposterous to common sense. Space is not measurable:we attribute dimensionality to space because such is the method ofthe mind; and that dimensionality we attribute to space isprogressive because progression is a law of the mind. The so-calleddimensions of space are to space itself as the steps that a climbercuts in the face of a cliff are to the cliff itself. They are notnecessary to the cliff: they are necessary only to the climber. Dimensionality is the mind's method of mounting to the idea of theinfinity of space. When we speak of the fourth dimension, what wemean is the fourth stage in the apprehension of that infinity. Wemight as legitimately speak of a fifth dimension, but theprofitlessness of any discussion of a fifth and higher stages liesin the fact that they can be intelligently approached only throughthe fourth, which is still largely unintelligible. The case is likethat of a man promised an increase of wages after he had worked amonth, who asks for his second month's pay before he is entitled tothe first. 

THE SUBJECTIVITY OF SPACE

Without going deep into the doctrine of the ideality--that is, thepurely subjective reality--of space, it is easy to show that we havearrived at our conception of a space of three dimensions by anintellectual process. The sphere of the senses is two-dimensional:except for the slight aid afforded by binocular vision, sight givesus moving pictures _on a plane_, and touch contacts _surfaces_ only. What circumstances, we may ask, have compelled our intellect toconceive of _solid_ space? This question has been answered as follows:

"If a child contemplates his hand, he is conscious of its existencein a double manner--in the first place by its tangibility, thesecond by its image on the retina of his eye. By repeated gropingabout and touching, the child knows by experience that his handretains the same form and extension through all the variations ofdistance and position under which it is observed, notwithstandingthat the form and extension of the image on the retina constantlychange with the different position and distance of his hand inrespect to his eye. The problem is thus set to the child'sunderstanding: how to reconcile to his comprehension the apparentlycontradictory facts of the _invariableness_ of the object togetherwith the _variableness_ of its appearance. This is only possiblewithin a space of three dimensions, in which, owing to perspectivedistortions and changes, these variations of projection can bereconciled with the constancy of the form of a body. "

Thus we have come to the idea of a three-dimensional space in orderto overcome the apparent contradictoriness of facts of sensibleexperience. Should we observe in three-dimensional spacecontradictory facts our reason would be forced to reconcile thesecontradictions, also, and if they could be reconciled by the idea ofa four-dimensional space our reason would accept this idea withoutcavil. Furthermore, if from our childhood, phenomena had been ofdaily occurrence requiring a space of four or more dimensions for anexplanation conformable to reason, we should feel ourselves nativeto a space of four or more dimensions. 

Poincaré, the great French mathematician and physicist, arrived atthese same conclusions by another route. By a process ofmathematical reasoning of a sort too technical to be appropriatelygiven here, he discovers an order in which our categories rangethemselves naturally, and which corresponds with the points of space;and that this order presents itself in the form of what he calls a"three circuit distribution board. " "Thus the characteristic propertyof space, " he says, "that of having three dimensions, is only aproperty of our distribution board, _a property residing, so to speak, in human intelligence_. " He concludes that a different associationof ideas would result in a different distribution board, and thatmight be sufficient to endow space with a fourth dimension. Heconcedes that there may be thinking beings, living in our world, whose distribution board has four dimensions, and who doconsequently think in hyperspace. 

THE NEED OF AN ENLARGED SPACE-CONCEPT

It is the contrariety in phenomena already referred to, that isforcing advanced minds to entertain the idea of higher space. Mathematical physicists have found that experimental contradictionsdisappear if, instead of referring phenomena to a set of three spaceaxes and one time axis of reference, they be referred to a set offour interchangeable axes involving four homogeneous co-ordinates. In other words, _time_ is made the fourth dimension. Psychicphenomena indicate that occasionally, in some individuals, the will is capable of producing physical movements for whosegeometrico-mathematical definition a four-dimensional system ofco-ordinates is necessary. This is only another step along the roadwhich the human mind has always travelled: our conception of thecosmos grows more complete and more just at the same time that itrecedes more and more beneath the surface of appearances. 

Far from the Higher Space Hypothesis complicating thought, itsimplifies by synthesis and co-ordination in a manner analogous tothat by which plane geometry is simplified when solid geometrybecomes a subject of study. By immersing the mind in the idea ofmany dimensions, we emancipate it from the idea of dimensionality. But the mind moves most readily, as has been said, in orderedsequence. Frankly submitting ourselves to this limitation, evenwhile recognizing it as such, let us learn such lessons from it aswe can, serving the illusions that master us until we have made themour slaves. 

II THE DIMENSIONAL LADDER

LEARNING TO THINK IN TERMS OF SPACES

The Reader who is willing to consider the Higher Space Hypothesisseriously, who would discover, by its aid, new and profound truthsclosely related to life and conduct, should first of all endeavor toarouse in himself a new power of perception. This he will bestaccomplish by learning to discern dimensional sequences, not alonein geometry, but in the cosmos and in the natural world. By so doinghe may erect for himself a veritable Jacob's ladder, "Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross. "

He should accustom himself to ascend it, step by step, dimension bydimension. Then he will learn to trust Emerson's dictum, "Naturegeometrizes, " even in regions where the senses fail him, and the mindalone leads on. Much profitable amusement is to be gained by suchexercises as follow. They are in the nature of a running up and downthe scales in order to give strength and flexibility to a new set ofmental fingers. Learning to think in terms of spaces contributes toour emancipation from the tyranny of space. 

FROM THE COSMOS TO THE CORPUSCLE

By way of a beginning, proceed, by successive stages, from thecontemplation of the greatest thing conceivable to the contemplationof the most minute, and note the space sequences revealed by thisshifting of the point of view. 

The greatest thing we can form any conception of is the starryfirmament made familiar to the mind through the study of astronomy. No limit to this vastitude has ever been assigned. Since thebeginning of recorded time, the earth, together with the otherplanets and the sun, has been speeding through interstellar space atthe rate of 300, 000, 000 miles a year, without meeting or passing asingle star. A ray of light, travelling with a velocity so great asto be scarcely measurable within the diameter of the earth's orbit, takes years to reach even the nearest star, centuries to reach thosemore distant. Viewed in relation to this universe of suns, ourparticular sun and all its satellites--of which the earth isone--shrinks to a point (a _physical_ point, so to speak--notgeometrical one). 

The mind recoils from these immensities: let us forsake them, then, for more familiar spaces, and consider the earth in its relation tothe sun. Our planet appears as a _moving_ point, tracing out a_line_--a _one-space_--its path around the sun. Now let us removeourselves in imagination only far enough from the earth for humanbeings thereon to appear as minute moving things, in the semblance, let us say, of insects infesting an apple. It is clear that fromthis point of view these beings have a freedom of movement in their"space" (the surface of the earth), of which the larger unit is notpossessed; for while the earth itself can follow only a _line_, itsinhabitants are free to move in the two dimensions of the surface ofthe earth. 

Abandoning our last coign of vantage, let us descend in imaginationand mingle familiarly among men. We now perceive that thesecreatures which from a distance appeared as though flat upon theearth's surface, are in reality erect at right angles to its plane, and that they are endowed with the power to move their members in_three dimensions_. Indeed, man's ability to traverse the surfaceof the earth is wholly dependent upon his power of three-dimensionalmovement. Observe that with each transfer of our attention fromgreater units to smaller, we appear to be dealing with a power ofmovement in an additional dimension. 

Looking now in thought not _at_ the body of man, but _within_ it, weapprehend an ordered universe immensely vast in proportion to thatphysical ultimate we name the electron, as is the firmament immenselyvast in proportion to a single star. It has been suggested that inthe infinitely minute of organic bodies there is a power of movementin a _fourth_ dimension. If so, such four-dimensional movement maybe the proximate cause of the phenomenon of _growth_--of thosechemical changes and renewals whereby an organism is enabled toexpand in three-dimensional space, just as by a three-dimensionalpower of movement (the act of walking) man is able to traverse histwo-dimensional space--the surface of the earth. 

--AND BEYOND

Proceed still further. Behind such organic change--assumed to befour-dimensional--there is the determination of some _will-to-live_, which manifests itself to consciousness as thought and as desire. Into these the idea of space does not enter: we think of them as in_time_. But if there are developments of other dimensions of space, thought and emotion may themselves be discovered to have spacerelations; that is, they may find expression in the forms of _higher_spaces. Thus is opened up one of those rich vistas in which thesubject of the fourth dimension abounds, but into which wecan only glance in passing. If there are such higher-dimensional_thought-forms_, our normal consciousness, limited to a world ofthree dimensions, can apprehend only their three-dimensional aspects, and these not simultaneously, but successively--that is, in _time_. According to this view, any unified series of _actions_--for example, the life of an individual, or of a group--would represent thestraining, so to speak, of a thought-form through our _time_, as thebodies subject to these actions would represent its strainingthrough our space. 

EVOLUTION AS SPACE-CONQUEST

Evolution is a struggle for, and a conquest of, space; for evolution, as the word implies, is a _drawing out_ of what is inherent fromlatency into objective reality, or in other words into spatial--andtemporal--extension. 

This struggle for space, by means of which the birth and growth oforganisms is achieved, is the very texture of life, the plot ofevery drama. Cells subdivide; micro-organisms war on one another;plants contend for soil, light, moisture; flowers cunningly subornthe bee to bring about their nuptials; animals wage deadly warfarein their rivalry to bring more hungry animals into a space-hungryworld. Man is not exempt from this law of the jungle. Nationsintrigue and fight for land--of which wealth is only the symbol--anda nation's puissance is measured by its power to push forward intothe territory of its neighbor. The self-same impulse drives theindividual. One measure of the difference between men in the matterof efficiency is the amount of space each can command: one has ahouse and grounds in some locality where every square inch has anappreciable value; another some fractional part of a lodging housein the slums. When this bloodless, but none the less deadly, contestfor space becomes acute, as in the congested quarters of great cities, man's ingenuity is taxed to devise effective ways of augmenting his_space-potency_, and he expands in a vertical direction. Thisthird-dimensional extension, typified in the tunnel and in theskyscraper, is but the latest phase of a conquest of space whichbegan with the line of the pioneer's trail through an untrackedwilderness. 

DIMENSIONAL SEQUENCES

Not only does nature everywhere geometrize, but she does so in aparticular way, in which we discover dimensional sequences. Considerthe transformation of solid, liquid, gas, from one to another, underthe influence of heat. A solid, set in free motion, can follow onlya _line_--as is the case of a thrown ball. A liquid has the addedpower of lateral extension. Its tendency, when intercepted, is tospread out in the two dimensions of a _plane_--as in the case of agriddle cake; while a gas expands universally in all directions, asshown by a soap-bubble. It is a reasonable inference that the fourthstate of matter, the corpuscular, is affiliated to somefour-dimensional manner of extension, and that there may be statesbeyond this, involving even higher development of space. 

Next glance at the vegetable kingdom. The seed, a _point_, generatesa _line_ system, in stem, branches, twigs, from which depend _planes_in the form of leaves and flowers, and from these come fruit, _solids_. 

 "The point, the line, the surface and the sphere, In seed, stem, leaf and fruit appear. "

A similar sequence may be noted within the body: the _line_-networkof the nerves conveys the message of sensation from the _surface_ ofthe body to some center in the _solid_, of the brain--and thence tothe Silent Thinker, "he who is without and within, " or in terms ofour hypothesis, "he who dwells in higher space. "

MAN THE GEOMETER

When man essays the rôle of creator he cannot do otherwise thanfollow similar sequences: it is easy to discern dimensionalprogression in the products of man's ingenuity and skill. Consider, for example, the evolution of a building from its inception to itscompletion. It exists first of all in the mind of the architect, andthere it is indubitably higher-spatial, for he can interpenetrateand examine every part, and he can consider it all at once, viewingit simultaneously from without and from within, just as one would beable to do in a space of four dimensions. He begins to give his ideaphysical embodiment by making with a pencil-_point, lines_ on a_plane_ (a piece of paper), the third dimension being representedby means of the other two. Next (if he is careful and wise) he makesa three-dimensional model. From the architect's drawings the engineerestablishes his points, lays out his angles, and runs his lines uponthe site itself. The mason follows, and with his footing coursesmakes ponderable and permanent the lines of the engineer. Theselines become in due course walls--vertical planes. Floors androofs--horizontal planes--follow, until some portion ofthree-dimensional space has been enclosed. 

Substantially the same sequence holds, whatever the kind of buildingor the character of the construction--whether a steel-framedskyscraper or a wooden shanty. A line system, represented by columnsand girders in the one case, and by studs and rafters in the other, becomes, by overlay or interposition, a system of planes, soassembled and correlated as to define a solid. 

With nearly everything of man's creating--be it a bureau or abattleship--the process is as above described. First, a pattern toscale; next, an actual linear framework; then planes defining a solid. Consider almost any of the industries practiced throughout the ages:they may be conceived of thus in terms of dimensions; for example, those ancient ones of weaving and basket making. _Lines_ (threads inthe one case, rushes in the other) are wrought into _planes_ toclothe a body or to contain a burden. Or think, if you choose, ofthe modern industry of book-making, wherein types are assembled, impressed upon sheets of paper, and these bound into volumes--_points, lines, planes, solids_. The book in turn becomes the unitof another dimensional order, in the library whose serried shelvesform lines, which, combined into planes, define the lateral limitsof the room. 

HIGHER--AND HIGHEST--SPACE

These are truisms. What have they to do, it may be asked, with theidea of _higher_ spaces? They have everything to do with it, for inachieving the enclosure of any portion of solid space the limit ofknown dimensions has been reached without having come to any end. More dimensions--higher spaces--are required to account for higherthings. All of the products of man's ingenuity are inanimate exceptas he himself animates them. They remain as they were made, machines, not organisms. They have no inherent life of their own, no power ofgrowth and renewal. In this they differ from animate creationbecause the highest achievement of the creative faculty in man in amechanical way lacks the life principle possessed by the plant. Andas the most perfect machine is inferior in this respect to thehumblest flower that grows, so is the highest product of thevegetable kingdom inferior to man himself, the maker of the machine;for he can reflect upon his own and the world's becoming, while theplant can only become. 

What is the reason for these differences of power and function?According to the Higher Space Hypothesis they are due to varyingpotencies of movement in the secret causeways and corridors of space. The higher functions of consciousness--volition, emotion, intellection--may be in some way correlated with the higher powersof numbers, and with the corresponding higher developments of space. Thus would the difference between physics and metaphysics become adifference of degree and not of kind. Evolution is to be conceivedof as a continuous pushing back of the boundary betweenrepresentation and reality, or as a conquest of space. We mayconceive of space as of an infinite number of dimensions, and ofconsciousness as a moving--or rather as an expanding--point, embracing this infinity, involving worlds, powers, knowledges, felicities, within itself in everlasting progression. 

III PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

LOOKING FOR THE GREATER IN THE LESS

After the assured way in which the author has conducted the readerrepeatedly up and down the dimensional ladder, it may be a surpriseto learn that physical phenomena offer no irrefragable evidences ofhyper-dimensionality. We could not think in higher space ifconsciousness were limited to three dimensions. The mathematicalreality of higher space is never in question: the higher dimensionsare as valid as the lower, but the hyper-dimensionality of matter isstill unproven. Man's ant-like efforts to establish this as a truthhave thus far been vain. 

Lest this statement discourage the reader at the very outset, heshould understand the reason for such failure. We are _embedded_ inour own space, and if that space be embedded in higher space, how arewe going to discover it? If space is curved, how are we going tomeasure its curvature? Our efforts to do so may be compared tomeasuring the distance between the tips of a bent bow by measuringalong the bow instead of along the string. 

Imagine a scientifically-minded threadworm to inhabit a page ofEuclid's solid geometry: the evidences of three-dimensionality arethere, in the very diagrams underneath his eyes; but you could not_show_ him a solid--the flat page could not contain it, any morethan our space can contain a form of four dimensions. You could onlysay to him, "These lines _represent_ a solid. " He would have todepend on his _faith_ for belief and not on that "knowledge gainedby exact observation and correct thinking" in which alone thescientist finds a sure ground for understanding. 

It is an axiom of science never to look outside three-space horizonsfor an understanding of phenomena when these can logically beaccounted for within those horizons. Now because, on the HigherSpace Hypothesis, each space is the container of all phenomena ofits own order, the futility, for practical purposes, of goingoutside is at once apparent. The highly intelligent threadwormneither knows nor cares that the point of intersection of two linesin his diagram _represents_ a point in a space to which he is astranger. The point is there, on his page: it is what he calls a_fact_. "Why raise" (he says) "these puzzling and merely academicquestions? Why attempt to turn the universe completely upside down?"

But though no _proofs_ of hyper-dimensionality have been found innature, there are equally no contradictions of it, and by using amethod not inductive, but deductive, the Higher Space Hypothesisis plausibly confirmed. Nature affords a sufficient number of_representations_ of four-dimensional forms and movements to justifytheir consideration. 

SYMMETRY

Let us first flash the light of our hypothesis upon an all butuniversal characteristic of living forms, yet one of the mostinexplicable--_symmetry_. 

Animal life exhibits the phenomenon of the right-and left-handedsymmetry of solids. This is exemplified in the human body, whereinthe parts are symmetrical with relation to the axial _plane_. Another more elementary type of symmetry is characteristic of thevegetable kingdom. A leaf in its general contour is symmetrical:here the symmetry is about a _line_--the midrib. This type ofsymmetry is readily comprehensible, for it involves simply arevolution through 180 degrees. Write a word on a piece of paper andquickly fold it along the line of writing so that the wet inkrepeats the pattern, and you have achieved the kind of symmetryrepresented in a leaf. 

With the symmetry of solids, or symmetry with relation to an axial_plane_, no such simple movement as the foregoing suffices toproduce or explain it, because symmetry about a plane implies_four-dimensional_ movement. It is easy to see why this must be so. In order to achieve symmetry in any space--that is, in any givennumber of dimensions--there must be revolution in the next higherspace: one more dimension is necessary. To make the (two-dimensional)ink figure symmetrical, it had to be folded over _in the thirddimension_. The revolution took place about the figure's _line_ ofsymmetry, and in a _higher_ dimension. In _three_-dimensionalsymmetry (the symmetry of solids) revolution must occur about thefigure's _plane_ of symmetry, and in a higher--i. E. , the _fourth_dimension. Such a movement we can reason about with mathematicaldefiniteness: we see the result in the right- and left-handedsymmetry of solids, but we cannot picture the movement ourselvesbecause it involves a space of which our senses fail to give anyaccount. 

Now could it be shown that the two-dimensional symmetry observed innature is the result of a three-dimensional movement, the right-andleft-handed symmetry of solids would by analogy be the result of a_four_-dimensional movement. Such revolution (about a plane) wouldbe easily achieved, natural and characteristic, in four space, justas the analogous movement (about a line) is easy, natural, andcharacteristic, in our space of three dimensions. 

OTHER ALLIED PHENOMENA

In the mirror image of a solid we have a representation of whatwould result from a four-dimensional revolution, the surface of themirror being the plane about which the movement takes place. If sucha change of position were effected in the constituent parts of abody as a mirror image of it _represents_, the body would haveundergone a revolution in the fourth dimension. Now two varieties oftartaric acid crystallize in forms bearing the relation to oneanother of object to mirror image. It would seem more reasonable toexplain the existence of these two identical, but reversed, varieties of crystal, by assuming the revolution of a single varietyin the fourth dimension, than by any other method. 

There are two forms of sugar found in honey, dextrose and levulose. They are similar in chemical constitution, but the one is thereverse of the other when examined by polarized light--that is, theyrotate the plane of polarization of a ray of light in opposite ways. If their atoms are conceived to have the power of motion in thefourth dimension, it would be easy to understand why they differ. Certain snails present the same characteristics as these two formsof sugar. Some are coiled to the right and others to the left; andit is remarkable that, like dextrose and levulose, their juices areoptically the reverse of each other when studied by polarized light. 

Revolution in the fourth dimension would also explain the change ina body from producing a right-handed, to producing a left-handed, polarization of light. 

ISOMERISM

In chemistry the molecules of a compound are assumed to consist ofthe atoms of the elements contained in the compound. These atoms aresupposed to be at certain distances from one another. It sometimeshappens that two compound substances differ in their chemical orphysical properties, or both, even though they have like chemicalelements in the same proportion. This phenomenon is called isomerism, and the generally accepted explanation is that the atoms in isomericmolecules are differently arranged, or grouped, in space. It isdifficult to imagine how atoms, alike in number, nature, andrelative proportion, can be so grouped as somehow to producecompounds with different properties, particularly as inthree-dimensional space four is the greatest number of points whosemutual distances, six in number, are all independent of each other. In four-dimensional space, however, the _ten_ equal distancesbetween any two of _five_ points are geometrically independent, thusgreatly augmenting the number and variety of possible arrangementsof atoms. 

This just escapes being the kind of proof demanded by science. Ifthe independence of all the possible distances between the atoms ofa molecule is absolutely required by theoretical chemical research, then science is really compelled, in dealing with molecules of morethan four atoms, to make use of the idea of a space of more thanthree dimensions. 

THE ORBITAL MOTION OF SPHERES: CELL SUB-DIVISION

There is in nature another representation of hyper-dimensionalitywhich, though difficult to demonstrate, is too interesting andsignificant to be omitted here. 

Imagine a helix, intersected, in its vertical dimension, by a movingplane. If necessary to assist the mind, suspend a spiral springabove a pail of water, then raise the pail until the coils, oneafter another, become immersed. The spring would represent the helix, and the surface of the water the moving plane. Concentratingattention upon this surface, you would see a point--the ellipticalcross-section of the wire where it intersected the plane--movinground and round in a circle. Next conceive of the wire itself as alesser helix of many convolutions, and repeat the experiment. Thepoint of intersection would then continually return upon its owntrack in a series of minute loops forming those lesser loops, which, moving circle-wise, registered the involvement of the helix in theplane. 

It is easy to go on imagining complicated structures of the natureof the spiral, and to suppose also that these structures aredistinguishable from each other at every section. If we think of theintersection of these with the rising surface, as the atoms, orphysical units, of a plane universe, we shall have a world ofapparent motion, with bodies moving harmoniously amongst one another, each a cross-section of some part of an unchanging and unmovingthree-dimensional entity. 

Now augment the whole by an additional dimension--raise everythingone space. The helix of many helices would become four-dimensional, and superficial space would change to solid space: each tiny circleof intersection would become a sphere of the same diameter, describing, instead of loops, helices. Here we would be amongfamiliar forms, describing familiar motions: the forms, for example, of the earth and the moon and of their motion about the sun; of theatom, as we imagine it, the molecule and the cell. For is not thesphere, or ovoid, the unit form of nature; and is not the spiralvortex its characteristic motion, from that of the nebula in the skyto the electron in the atom? Thus, on the hypothesis that our spaceis traversing four-dimensional space, and that the forms of ourspace are cross-sections of four-dimensional forms, the unity andharmony of nature would be accounted for in a remarkably simplemanner. 

The above exercise of the imagination is a good preparation for thenext demand upon it. Conceive a dichotomous tree--one that alwaysdivides into two branches--to pass through a plane. We should have, as a plane section, a circle of changing size, which would elongateand divide into two circles, each of which would do the same. Thisreminds us of the segmentation of cell life observed under themicroscope, as though a four-dimensional figure were registering itspassage through our space. 

THE ELECTRIC CURRENT

Hinton conceived of an electric current as a four-dimensional vortex. He declared that on the Higher Space Hypothesis the revolution ofthe ether would yield the phenomenon of the electric current. Thereader is referred to Hinton's book, _The Fourth Dimension_, for anextended development of this idea. What follows is a brief summaryof his argument. First, he examines the characteristics of a vortexin a three-dimensional fluid. Then he conceives of what such avortex would be in a four-dimensional medium of analogous properties. The whirl would be about a _plane_, and the contour of this planewould correspond to the ends of the axis line in the former vortex;and as before, the vortex would extend to the boundary. Everyelectric current forms a closed circuit: this is equivalent to thehyper-vortex having its ends in the boundary of the hyper-fluid. Thevortex with a _surface_ as its axis, therefore, affords a geometricimage of a closed circuit. 

Hinton supposes a conductor to be a body which has the propertyof serving as a terminal abutment to such a hyper-vortex as hasbeen described. The conception that he forms of a closed current, therefore, is of a vortex sheet having its _edge_ along thecircuit of the conducting wire. The whole wire would then be likethe centers on which a spindle turns in three-dimensional space, and any interruption of the continuity of the wire would producea _tension_ in place of a continuous revolution. The phenomenaof electricity--polarity, induction, and the like--are of the natureof the stress and strain of a medium, but one possessing propertiesunlike those of ordinary matter. The phenomena can be explained interms of higher space. If Hinton's hypothesis be the true explanation, the universality of electro-magnetic action would again point to theconclusion that our three-dimensional world is _superficial_--thesurface, that is, of a four-dimensional universe. 

THE GREATER UNIVERSE

This practically exhausts the list of accepted and accreditedindications of hyper-dimensionality in our physical environment. Butif the collective human consciousness is moving into the fourthdimension, such indications are bound to multiply out of all measure. It should be remembered that in Franklin's day electricity wasmanifest only in the friction of surfaces and in the thunderbolt. To-day all physical phenomena, in their last analysis, are consideredto be electrical. The world is not different, but perception hasevolved, and is evolving. 

There is another field, in which some of our ablest minds aresearching for evidences of the curvature of space, the field ofastronomy and astro-physics. But into this the layman hesitates toenter because the experts themselves have found no common ground ofunderstanding. The ether of space is a battlefield strewn with deadand dying hypotheses; gravitation, like multiplication, is vexation;the very nature of time, form and movement is under vivid discussion, in connection with what is known as the Theory of Relativity. 

Notwithstanding these counter-currents of speculation, which shouldmake the wise man speak smilingly of his wisdom, this summaryremains incomplete without a reference to the pressure of higherspace upon those adventurous minds that essay to deal with theprofound problems of the greater universe, and a statement of thereasons for their feeling this pressure. These reasons are wellsuggested by Professor B. G. Harrison, in his _Popular Astronomy_. Hesays: "With the idea of a universe of finite dimensions there is theobvious difficulty of the beyond. The truth is that a universe offinite proportions is equally difficult to realize as one ofinfinite extent. Perhaps the nearest analogy to infinity that we canunderstand lies in our conception of a closed curve. It seems easierto imagine the endless movement of a sphere in a circular path thanthe case of one travelling in a straight line. Possibly this analogymay apply in some way to fourth-dimensional space, but the manner ofits application is certainly not easy to understand. If we wouldimagine that all co-ordinates of time and space were curved, andeventually return to the same point, it might bring the ultimatecomprehension one degree nearer. "

A HINT FROM ASTRONOMY

The physical evidence that our space is thus curved in higher space, some have considered astronomy to furnish in what is called the"negative parallax" of certain distant stars. This cannot be passedby, though it is too deeply involved with the probable error of theobservers themselves to be considered more than an interesting factin this connection. Every one knows that the difference of angleunder which an object is seen from two standpoints is called itsparallax. The parallax of the stars--and the consequent knowledge oftheir distance--is obtained by observing them from opposite pointsof the earth's orbit around the sun. When a star is within measurabledistance, these angles are acute, and the lines from the star to theearth at opposite sides of its orbit converge, therefore. But whenthese lines, as sometimes happens, appear to be _divergent_, theresult is called a _negative_ parallax, and is explainable by higherspace relationships. Obviously, the divergence of the lines wouldindicate that the object lies _behind_ the observer instead of infront of him. This anomaly can be explained by the curvature of spacein the fourth dimension. If space is so curved, the path of lightitself is curved also, and a man--were his vision immeasurably keen, not to say telescopic--could see the back of his own head! It is notworth while to give this question of negative parallax too muchimportance, by reason of the probability of error, but in thisconnection it should be stated that there appears to be an unduenumber of negative parallaxes recorded. 

GRAVITATION

Gravitation remains a puzzle to science. The tendency of modernphysics is to explain all material phenomena in terms of electronsand the ether, but the attempt to account for gravitation in thisway is attended with difficulties. In order to cope with these, itseems necessary to assume that our universe is only a portion of agreater universe. This assumption readily lends itself to theconception of our universe as a three-dimensional meeting place oftwo portions of a universe of four dimensions--that is, itsconception as a "higher" surface. This is a fundamental postulate ofhigher space speculation. 

One hypothesis advanced to explain gravitation assumes the existenceof a constant hydrostatic pressure transmitted through the ether. Asteady flow of ether into every electron in a gravitating system ofbodies would give rise to forces of attraction between them, varyinginversely as the square of the distance, according to Newton's law. But in order to avoid the conception of the continual destructionand creation of ether, it is necessary to assume a steady flowthrough every electron between our universe and the greater universeof which it is assumed to form a part Now because the electrons, inorder to receive this flow, must lie on the boundary of this greateruniverse, the latter must be four-dimensional. Every electron, inother words, must be the starting point of a pathway into--and aterminal point out of--four-dimensional space. Here we have anotherfamiliar higher space concept. 

THE ETHER OF SPACE

The ether of space, because it has at last found entrance, must begiven a grudging hospitality in these pages, even though themysterious stranger prove but a ghost. The Relativists would have itthat with the acceptance of their point of view the ether may beeliminated; but if they take away the ether, they must give ussomething in its stead. In whatever way the science of the futuredisposes of this problem, it must take into account the fact oflight transmission. On the theory that the ether is an elastic solidof amazing properties, in which the light waves vibrate _transversely_to their direction, it assists the mind to think of the ether asfour-dimensional, because then a light wave would be a superficialdisturbance of the medium--superficial, but three-dimensional, asmust needs be the case with the surface of a four-dimensional solid. 

 * * * * *

This search for evidences of hyper-dimensionality in the universeaccessible to our senses is like looking, not for a needle in ahaystack, but for a haystack in a needle--for the greater in the less. From the purely physical evidences, all that can with certainty besaid is that the hypothesis is not inconsistent with the facts ofscience or its laws; that it is being verified and rendered moreprobable by the investigations of science; that it is applicable tothe description or explanation of all the observed phenomena, andassigns a cause fully adequate to have produced them. 

Now there is an order of phenomena that we call psychic. Becausethey are phenomenal they cannot occur outside of time and spacealtogether; because they are psychic they defy explanation in termsof the space and time of every-day life. Let us next examine thesein the light of our hypothesis. 

IV TRANSCENDENTAL PHYSICS

ZÖLLNER

In the year 1877, Johann Friedrich Zöllner, professor of physics andastronomy at the University of Leipsic, undertook to prove thatcertain (so-called) psychic phenomena were susceptible of explanationon the hypothesis of a four-dimensional space. He used asillustrations the phenomena induced by the medium Henry Slade. Bythe irony of events, Slade was afterward arrested and imprisoned forfraud, in England. This fact so prejudiced the public mind againstZöllner that his name became a word of scorn, and the fourth dimensiona synonym for what is fatuous and false. Zöllner died of it, butsince his death public opinion has undergone a change. There is agreat and growing interest in everything pertaining to the fourthdimension, and belief in that order of phenomena upon which Zöllnerbased his deductions is supported by evidence at once voluminous andimpressive. 

It is unnecessary to go into the question of the genuineness of theparticular phenomena which Zöllner witnessed. His conclusions arealone important, since they apply equally to other manifestations, whose authenticity has never been successfully impeached. Zöllner'sreasoning with regard to certain psychic phenomena is somewhat alongthe following lines. 

APPARITIONS

_The intrusion (as an apparition) of a person or thing into acompletely enclosed portion of three-space; or contrariwise, theexit (as an evanishment) out of such a space_. 

Because we lack the sense of four-dimensional space, we must herehave recourse to analogy, and assume three-dimensional space to bethe unsensed higher region encompassing a world of two dimensions, To a hypothetical flat-man of a two-space, any portion of his planesurrounded by an unbroken line would constitute an enclosure. Werehe confined within it, escape would be impossible by any means knownto him. Had he the ability to move in the third dimension, however, he could rise, pass over the enclosing line without disturbing it, and descend on the other side. The moment he forsook the plane hewould disappear from two-dimensional space. Such a disappearancewould constitute an occult phenomenon in a world of two dimensions. 

Correspondingly, an evanishment from any three-dimensionalenclosure--such as a room with locked doors and windows--might beeffected by means of a movement in the fourth dimension. Because abody would disappear from our perception the moment it forsook ourspace, such a disappearance would be a mystery; it would constitutean occult phenomenon. The thing would be no more mysterious, however, to a consciousness embracing four dimensions within its ken, thanthe transfer of an object from the inside to the outside of a planefigure without crossing its linear boundary is mysterious to us. 

POSSESSION

_The temporary possession of a person's body, or some member ofthat body, by an alien will, as exemplified in automatic writing andobsession_. 

It would doubtless amaze the scientifically orthodox to know howmany people habitually and successfully practice the dubious art ofautomatic writing--not mediums, so-called, but people of refinementand intelligence. Although the messages received in this way mayemanate from the subconscious mind of the performer, there isevidence to indicate that they come sometimes from an intelligencediscarnate, or from a person remote from the recipient in space. 

If such is indeed the case, if the will is extraneous, how does itpossess itself of the nerves and muscles of the hand of the writer?The Higher Space Hypothesis is of assistance here. It is onlynecessary to remember that from the fourth dimension the interior ofa solid is as much exposed as the interior of a plane figure isexposed from the region of the third dimension. A four-dimensionalbeing would experience no difficulty, under suitable conditions, inpossessing itself of any part of the bodily mechanism of another. 

The same would hold true in cases of possession and obsession; forif the bastion of the hand can thus be captured, so also may thecitadel of the brain. Certain familiar forms of hypnotism are notdifferent from obsession, the hypnotizer using the brain and body ofhis subject as though they were his own. All unconsciously to himself, he has called into play four-dimensional mechanics. Many cases ofso-called dual personality are more easily explicable as possessionby an alien will than on the less credible hypothesis that thecharacter, habits, and language of a person can change utterly in amoment of time. 

CLAIRVOYANCE IN SPACE

_Vision at a distance and the exercise of a superior power of sight_. 

Clairvoyance in space is of various kinds and degrees. Sometimes itconsists in the perception of super-physical phenomena--theunfurling of a strange and wonderful land; and again it appears tobe a higher power of ordinary vision, a kind of seeing to which theopacity of solids offers no impediment, or one involving spatialdistances too great and too impeded for normal physical vision to beeffective. 

That clairvoyance which consists in the ability to perceive notalone the superficies of things as ordinary vision perceives them, but their interiors as well, is analogous to the power given by theX-ray, by means of which, on a fluorescent screen, a man may beholdthe beating of his own heart. But, if the reports of trainedclairvoyants are to be believed, there is this difference:everything appears to them without the distortions due to perspective, objects being seen as though they were inside and not outside of theperceiving organ, or as though the observer were in the objectperceived; or in all places at the same time. 

Our analogy makes all this intelligible. To the flat-man, clairvoyance in space would consist in that power of perceptionwhich we exercise in reference to his plane. From the thirddimension the boundaries of plane figures offer no impedimentto the view of their interiors, and they themselves in no wayimpede our vision of surrounding objects. If we assume thatclairvoyance in space is the perception of the things of our worldfrom the region of the fourth dimension, the phenomena exactlyconform to the demands of our analogy. It is no more difficultfor a four-dimensional intelligence to understand the appearanceor disappearance of a body in a completely closed room, or thewithdrawal of an orange from its skin, without cutting or breakingthat skin, than it is for us to see the possibility of taking up apencil point from the center of a circle and putting it down outside. We are under no compulsion to draw a line across the circumferenceof the circle in order to enter or leave it. Moreover, the volume ofour sensible universe embraced in the clairvoyant's field of viewwill increase in the same way that a balloonist's view increases inarea as he rises above the surface of the earth. To account forclairvoyant vision at a distance, it is of course necessary to positsome perceptive organ other than the eye, but the fact that intrance the eyes are closed, itself demands this assumption. 

CLAIRVOYANCE IN TIME

_The perception of a past event as in process of occurring, or theprevision of something which comes to pass later_. 

No mechanistic explanation will serve to account for this order ofclairvoyance since it is inextricably involved in the mystery ofconsciousness itself. Yet our already overworked analogy can perhapscast a little light even here. 

To the flat-man, the third dimension of objects passing through hisplane translates itself to his experience into _time_. Were hecapable of rising in the positive direction of the third dimension, he would have pre-vision, because he would be cognizant of thatwhich had not yet intersected his plane: by sinking in the negativedirection, he would have post-vision, because he could re-cognizethat which had already passed. 

Now there are excellent reasons, other than those based on analogy, that the fourth-dimensional aspect of things may manifest itself toour ordinary experience, not as spatial extension, but as temporalchange. Then, if we conceive of clairvoyance as a transcending byconsciousness of our three-dimensional space, prevision andpost-vision would be logically possible as corresponding to thepositive and negative of the fourth dimension. This may be madeclearer by the aid of a homely illustration. 

PISGAH SIGHTS OF LIFE'S PAGEANT

Suppose you are standing on a street corner, watching a processionpass. You see the pageant as a sequence of objects and individualsappearing into view near by and suddenly, and disappearing in thesame manner. This would represent our ordinary waking consciousnessof what goes on in the world round about. Now imagine that you walkup the street in a direction opposite to that in which theprocession is moving. You then rapidly pass in review a portion ofthe procession which had not yet arrived at the point you were a fewmoments before. This would correspond to the seeing of somethingbefore it "happened, " and would represent the positive aspect ofclairvoyance in time--prevision. Were you to start from youroriginal position, and moving in the direction in which theprocession was passing, overtake it at some lower street corner, youcould witness the thing you had already seen. This would representpost-vision--clairvoyance of the past. 

A higher type of clairvoyance would be represented by the sweep ofvision possible from a balloon. From that place of vantage theprocession would be seen, not as a sequence, but simultaneously, andcould be traced from its formation to its dispersal. Past, presentand future would be merged in one. 

It is true that this explanation raises more questions than itanswers: to account in this way for a marvel, a greater marvel mustbe imagined--that of transport out of one's own "space. " The wholesubject bristles with difficulties, not the least of which is thateven to conceive of such a thing as prevision all our old ideasabout time must be recast. This is being done in the Principle ofRelativity, a subject which may appropriately engage our attentionnext. 

V CURVED TIME

TIME FROM THE STANDPOINT OF EXPERIMENT AND OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE

In some moment of "sudden light" what one of us has not been able tosay, with Rossetti, "I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell. "

Are such strange hauntings of our House of Life due to the cyclicreturn of time? Perhaps, --but what is time?

Suppose some one should ask you, "What is an hour?" Your answermight be, "It is the interval marked off by the clock-hand between 1and 2. " "But what if your clock is running down or speeding up?" Tothis you would probably reply, "The clock is set and corrected bythe earth, the sun and the stars, which are constant in theirmovements. " _But they are not_. The earth is known to be running slow, by reason of tide friction, and this is likely to continue until itwill revolve on its axis, not once a day, but once a year, presenting always the same face to the sun. 

We can only measure time by _uniform_ motion. Observe the viciouscircle. Uniform motion means the covering of equal spaces in equaltimes. But how are we to determine our equal times? Ultimately wehave no other criterion save the uniform motion of the clock-hand orthe star dial. The very expressions, "uniform motion, " "equal times, "beg the whole question of the nature of time. 

Let us then, in this predicament, consider time not from thestandpoint of experiment, but of conscious experience--what Bergsoncalls "real duration. "

Every point along the line of memory, of conscious experience, hasbeen traced out by that unresting stylus we call "the present moment. "The question of its rate of motion we will not raise, as it is onewith which we have found ourselves impotent to deal. We believe onthe best of evidence that the conscious experience of others isconditioned like our own. For better understanding let us haverecourse to a homely analogy: let us think of these more or lessparallel lines of individual experience in the semblance of thestrands of a skein of flax. Now if, _at the present moment_, thisskein were cut with a straight knife at right angles to its length, the cut end would represent the _time plane_--that is, the presentmoment of all--and it would be the same for all providing that thetime plane were flat _But is it really flat_? Isn't the straightnessof the knife a mere poverty of human imagination? Existence is alwaysricher and more dramatic than any diagram. 

 "Line in nature is not found; Unit and universe are round. In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless and ice will burn. "

Undoubtedly the flat time-plane represents with fair accuracy thetemporal conditions that obtain in the human aggregate in this worldunder normal conditions of consciousness, but if we consider ourrelation to intelligent beings upon distant worlds of the visibleuniverse the conditions might be widely different The time sectioncorresponding to what our straight knife made flat in the case ofthe flax may be--nay, probably is--strongly curved. 

RELATIVITY

This crude analogy haltingly conveys what is meant by curved time. It is an idea which is implicit in the Theory of Relativity. Thistheory has profoundly modified many of our basic conceptions aboutthe universe in which we are immersed. It is outside the province ofthis book and beyond the power of its author even so much as tosketch the main outlines of this theory, but certain of itsconclusions are indispensable, since they baldly set forth ourdilemma in regard to the measurement of space and time. We canmeasure neither except relatively, because they must be measured oneby the other, and no matter how they vary, these variations alwayscompensate one another, leaving us in the same state of ignorancethat we were in before. 

Suppose that two intelligent beings, one on Mars, let us say, andthe other on the earth, should attempt to establish _the same momentof time_, by the interchange of light signals, or by any othermethod which the most rigorous science could devise. Assume thatthey have for this purpose two identically similar and mechanicallyperfect chronometers, and that every difficulty of manipulation weresuccessfully overcome. Their experiment could end only in failure, and the measure of this failure neither one, in his own place, couldpossibly know. If, after the experiment, the Martian, chronometer inhand, could be instantly and miraculously transported to the earth, and the two settings compared, they would be found to be different:how different, we do not know. 

The reason for the failure of any such experiment anywhere conductedcan best be made plain by a crude paraphrase of a classicproposition from Relativity. Suppose it is required to determine thesame moment of time at two different places on the earth's surface, as must be attempted in finding their difference in longitude. Takethe Observatory at Greenwich for one place, and the observatory atWashington for the other. At the moment the sun is on the meridianof Greenwich, the exact time of crossing is noted and cabled toWashington. The chronometer at Washington is set accordingly, andthe time checked back to Greenwich. This message arrives two seconds, say, after the original message was sent. Washington is at oncenotified of this double transmission interval. On the assumptionthat HALF of it represents the time the message took to travel fromeast to west, and the other half the time from west to east again, the Washington chronometer is set one second ahead of the signalledtime, to compensate for its part of the loss. When the sun hasreached the meridian of Washington, the whole process is repeated, and again as before, half of the time the message has taken to crossand recross the Atlantic is added to the Greenwich record of noon atWashington. The number of hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions ofa second between these two corrected records represents thedifference in solar time between the two places, and incidentallythe same moment of time has been established for both--at least, soit would appear. 

But is it established? That each message took an equal time totravel each way is pure assumption, and happens to be a false one. The accuracy of the result is vitiated by a condition of things towhich the Relativists have called attention. Our determination mightbe defended if Washington and Greenwich could be assumed to remainat rest during the experiments, and some argument might even be madein its favor if we could secure any cosmic assurance that theresultant motion of the earth should be the same when Greenwichsignalled its noon to Washington and Washington its noon to Greenwich. 

Our present discussion is merely illustrative, or diagrammatic; sowe will neglect the velocity of the earth in its orbit round the sun, some forty times greater than that of a cannon ball, and the moreuncertain and more vertiginous speed of the whole solar systemtowards its unknown goal. Let us consider only the rotation of theearth on its axis, the tide-speed of day and night. To fix our idea, this may be taken, in our latitudes, at eighteen thousand miles perday, or perhaps half the speed of a Mauser rifle bullet. 

So fast, then, will Washington have been moving to meet the messagefrom Greenwich. So fast will Greenwich have been retreating fromWashington's message. 

Now the ultimate effect of motion on the time-determination cannotbe calculated along any such simple lines as these. Indeed, itcannot be exactly calculated at all, for we have not all the data. But there is certainly _some_ effect. Suppose one rows four miles upa river against a current of two miles per hour, at a rowing speedof four miles per hour. This will take two hours, plainly. Thereturn trip with the river's gift of two miles per hour willevidently require but forty minutes. _Two hours and forty minutes_for the round trip, then, of eight miles. 

Now then, to row eight miles in still water, according to oursupposition, would have required but _two hours_. But, some oneobjects, the current must help the return trip as much as ithindered the outgoing! Ah, here is the snare that catchesrough-and-ready common sense! How long would the double journey havetaken _if the river current had been faster than our rowing speed_?How shall we schedule our trip if we cannot learn the correct speed, _or if it varies from minute to minute_?

These explanations are necessarily symbolistic rather thandemonstrative, but any one who will seriously follow out these linesof thought, or, still better, study the attitude of the hard-headedmodern physicist towards our classical geometry and mechanics, cannot fail to realize how conventional, artificial--evenphantasmal--are the limitations set by the primitive idea of flatspace and straight time. 

The inferences which we may draw from our hypothetical experimentare plain. The settings of the two chronometers would be defective, they would not show the same time, but each of them would mark the_local_ time, proper to its own place. There would be no means ofdetecting the amount of error, since the messages were transmittedby a medium involved with them in their transportation. If onlylocal time can be established, the possibility of a warpedtime-plane--the curvature of time--is directly opened up. Doubtlessit is true that on so relatively minute a scale as is offered by theearth, any deviation from perfect flatness of the time-plane wouldbe so inconsiderable and imperceptible as to make it scientificallynegligible; but this by no means follows when we consider ourrelation to other worlds and other systems. 

A similar condition holds with regard to space-distortion. TheTheory of Relativity enforces the conclusion that from thestandpoint of our conventions in regard to these matters, all bodiesinvolved in transportation undergo a contraction in the direction ofthat transportation, while their dimensions perpendicular to thetransportation remain invariable. This contraction is the same forall bodies. For bodies of low velocity, like the earth, thisdistortion would be almost immeasurably slight; but great or little, no measuring instruments on the body transporting would everdisclose it, for a measure would undergo the same contraction as thething measured. 

THE SPOON-MAN

These concepts that space and time are not as immutable as theyappear: that our universe may suffer distortion, that time may lagor hasten without our being in the least aware, may be madeinterestingly clear by an illustration first suggested by Helmholtz, of which the following is in the nature of a paraphrase. 

If you look at your own image in the shining surface of a teapot, orthe back of a silver spoon, all things therein appear grotesquelydistorted, and all distances strangely altered. But if you choose tomake the bizarre supposition that this spoon-world is real, and yourimage--the spoon-man--a thinking and speaking being, certaininteresting facts could be developed by a discussion betweenyourself and him. 

You say, "Your world is a distorted transcript of the one in which Ilive. "

"Prove it to me, " says the spoon-man. 

With a foot-rule you proceed to make measurements to show therectangularity of the room in which you are standing. Simultaneouslyhe makes measurements giving the same numerical results; for hisfoot-rule shrinks and curves in the exact proportion to give thetrue number of feet when he measures his shrunken and distorted rearwall. No measurement you can apply will prove you in the right, norhim in the wrong. Indeed he is likely to retort upon you that it isyour room which is distorted, for he can show that in spite of allits nightmare aspects his world is governed by the same orderlygeometry that governs yours. 

The above illustration deals purely with space relations, for suchrelations are easily grasped; but certain distortions in timerelations are no less absolutely imperceptible and unprovable. Sofar from having any advantage over the spoon-man, our plight is his. The Principle of Relativity discovers us in the predicament of theMikado's "prisoner pent, " condemned to play with crooked cues andelliptical billiard balls, and of the opium victim, for whom"space swells" and time moves sometimes swift and sometimes slow. 

THE ORBITAL MOVEMENT OF TIME

Now if our space is curved in higher space, since such curvature isat present undetectable by us, we must assume, as Hinton chose toassume, that it curves in the minute, or, as some astronomers assume, that its curve is vast. These assumptions are not mutually exclusive:they are quite in analogy with the general curvature of the earth'ssurface which is in no wise interfered with by the lesser curvaturesrepresented by mountains and valleys. It is easiest to think of ourspace as completely curved in higher space in analogy with thesurface of a sphere. 

Similarly, if time is curved, the idea of the cyclic return of timenaturally (though not inevitably) follows, and the division of thegreater cycles into lesser loops; for it is easier to assign thiselliptical movement to time than any other, by reason of the orbitalmovements of the planets and their satellites. What results fromconceptions of this order? Amazing things! If our space is curved inhigher space, you may be looking toward the back of your own head. If time flows in cycles, in travelling toward to-morrow you may befacing yesterday. 

This "eternal return, " so far from being a new idea, is so old thatit has been forgotten. Its reappearance in novel guise, along withso many other recrudescences, itself beautifully illustrates timecurvature in consciousness. _Yugas_, time cycles, are an integraland inexpugnable part of Oriental metaphysics. "Since the soulperpetually runs, " says Zoroaster, "in a certain space of time itpasses through all things, which circulation being accomplished, itis compelled to run back again through all things, and unfold thesame web of generation in the world. " Time curvature is implicit inthe Greek idea of the iron, bronze, silver, and golden ages, succeeding each other in the same order: the winter, seed-time, summer and harvest of the larger year. Astrology, seership, prophecy, become plausible on the higher-time hypothesis. From this point ofview history becomes less puzzling and paradoxical. What were theMiddle Ages but a forgetting of Greek and Roman civilization, andwhat was the Renaissance but a remembering of them--a striving tore-create the ruined stage-settings and to re-enact the urbane playof Pagan life. The spirit of the Crusades is now again animatethroughout Europe. Nations are uniting in a Holy War against theInfidel _de nos jours_. 

But it is in the individual consciousness that time curvaturereceives its most striking confirmation--those lesser returns andrhythms to which we give the name of periodicity. Before consideringthese, however, a fundamental fallacy of the modern mind must beexposed. 

MATERIALITY THE MIRROR OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Our vicious habit of seeking the explanation of everything--eventhought and emotion--in materiality, has betrayed us into the errorof attributing to organic and environic changes the very power bywhich they are produced. We are wont to think of feeling, the formin which Being manifests to consciousness, as an effect instead ofas a cause. When Sweet Sixteen becomes suddenly and mysteriouslyinteresting to the growing boy, it is not because sex has awakenedin his body, but because the dread time has come for him tocontemplate the Idea of Woman in his soul. If you are sleepy, it isnot because the blood has begun to flow away from your brain, butbecause your body has begun to bore you. Night has brought back theIdea of Freedom, and consciousness chloroforms the thing thatclutches it. If you are ill, you grow cold or your temperature rises:it is the signal by which you know that your consciousness isturning toward the Idea of Pain. 

Just as a savage looks for a man behind a mirror, we foolishly seekin materiality for that which is not there. The soul determinescircumstance: the soul contains the event which shall befall. Theorganic and environic rearrangements incident to obscure rotationsin higher space are like the changes a mirror-image undergoes as anobject draws near and then recedes from its plane. This is only afigure of speech, but it is susceptible of almost literal application. Ideas, emerging from the subconscious, appproach, intersect, recedefrom, and re-approach the stream of conscious experience; taking theforms of aversions and desires, they register themselves in action, and by reason of time curvature, everything that occurs, recurs. 

PERIODICITY

We recognize and accept this cyclic return of time in such familiarmanifestations of it as Nature affords in _periodicity_. We recognizeit also in our mental and emotional life, when the periods can beco-ordinated with known physical phenomena, as in the case of thewanderlust which comes in the mild melancholy of autumn, the moods thatgo with waning day, and winter night. It is only when these recurrencesdo not submit themselves to our puny powers of analysis and measurementthat we are incredulous of a larger aspect of the law of time-return. Sleep for example, is not less mysterious than death which, too, may be but "a sleep and a forgetting. " The reason that sleep fails toterrify us as death does is because experience has taught that_memory leafs the chasm_. Why should death bedreaded any more thanbedtime? Because we fear that we shall forget. But do we really forget?As Pierre Janet so tersely puts it, "Whatever has gone into the mindmay come out of the mind, " and in a subsequent chapter this aphorismwill be shown to have extension in a direction of which the author ofit appears not to have been aware. Memory links night to night andwinter to winter, but such things as "the night-time of the spirit"and "the winter of our discontent" are not recognized as having eithercause or consequence. Now though the well-springs of these states ofconsciousness remain obscure, there is nothing unreasonable inbelieving that they are recrudescences of far-off, forgotten moodsand moments; neither is it absurd to suppose that they may be relatedto the movements and positions of the planets, as night and winterare related to the axial and orbital movements of the earth. 

But there are other, and even more interesting, evidences of timecurvature in consciousness. These lead away into new regions whichit is our pleasure now to explore. 

VI SLEEP AND DREAMS

SLEEP

Our space is called three-dimensional because it takes threenumbers--measurement in three mutually perpendicular directions--todetermine and mark out any particular point from the totality ofpoints. Time, as the individual experiences it, is calledone-dimensional for an analogous reason: one number is all that isrequired to determine and mark out any particular event of a seriesfrom all the rest. Now in order to establish a position in a space offour dimensions it would be necessary to measure in _four_ mutuallyperpendicular directions. Time curvature opens up the possibility ofa corresponding higher development in time: one whereby time wouldbe more fittingly symbolized by a plane than by a linear figure. Indeed, the familiar mystery of memory calls for such a conception. Memory is a carrying forward of the past into the present, and thefact that we can recall a past event without mentally rehearsingall the intermediate happenings in inverse order, shows that inthe time aspect of memory there is simultaneity as well assequence--time ceases to be linear and becomes _plane_. Moreremarkable illustrations of the sublimation of the time-sense areto be found in the phenomena of sleep and dreams. 

"Oh, thou that sleepest, what is sleep?" asks the curious Leonardo. Modern psychological science has little to offer of a positivenature in answer to this world-old question, but it has at leasteffectively disposed of the absurd theories of the materialists whowould have us believe that sleep is a mere matter of bloodcirculation or of intoxication by accumulation of waste products inthe system. Sleep states are not abnormal, but part and parcel ofthe life existence of the individual. When a person is asleep he hasonly become unresponsive to the mass of stimuli of the externalworld which constitutes his environment. As Sidis says, "When ourinterest in external existence fags and fades away, we go to sleep. When our interests in the external world cease, we draw up thebridges, so to say, interrupt all external communication as far aspossible, and become isolated in our own fortress and repair to ourown world of organic activity and inner dream life. Sleep is theinterruption of our intercourse with the external world: it is thelaying down of our arms in the struggle of life. Sleep is a trucewith the world. "

The twin concepts of higher space and curved time sanction a view ofsleep even bolder. Sleep is more than a longing of the body to befree of the flame which consumes it: the flame itself aspires to befree--that is to say, consciousness, tiring of its tool, the brain, and of the world, its workshop, takes a turn into the plaisance ofthe fourth dimension, where time and space are less rigid to resistthe fulfillment of desire. 

DREAMS

We find a confirmation of this view in dream phenomena. But howevergood the evidence, we shall fail to make out a case unless dreamexperiences are conceded to be as real as any other. The reluctancewe may have to make this concession comes first from the purelysubjective character of dreams, and secondly from their trivialityand irrationality--it is as though the muddy sediment of daytimethought and feeling and that alone were there cast forth. In answerto the first objection, advanced psychology affirms that thesubconscious mind, from which dreams arise, approaches more nearlyto the omniscience of true being than the rational mind of wakingexperience. The triviality and irrationality of dreams aresufficiently accounted for if the dream state is thought of as themeeting place of two conditions of consciousness: the foam andflotsam "of perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn, " whose vastitude, whose hidden life, and rich argosies of experience, can only beinferred from the fret of the tide on their nether shore--the tiredbrain in sleep. 

For it is the _remembered_ dream alone that is incoherent--the dreamthat comes clothed in the rags and trappings of this work-a-day world, and so leaves some recoverable record on the brain. We all feel thatthe dreams we cannot remember are the most wonderful. Who has notwakened with the sense of some incommunicable experience of terror orfelicity, too strange and poignant to submit itself to concretesymbolization, and so is groped for by the memory in vain? We knowthat dreams grow more ordered and significant as they recede fromthe surface of consciousness to its depths. Deep sleep dreams are inthe true sense clairvoyant, though for the most part irrecoverable--"Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?" DuPrel and others haveshown that the difference between ordinary dreaming, somnambulance, trance and ecstasy, is only a matter of redistribution ofthresholds--that they are all related states and merge into oneanother. We have, therefore, every right to believe that for acertain number of hours out of the twenty-four we are all sybils andseers, however little most of us are able to profit by it. Infrequently, in moments of peculiar susceptibility, the veil islifted, but the art of _dreaming true_ remains for the most partunmastered--one of the precious gifts which the future holds in storefor the sons and daughters of men. 

The partial waking state is the soil in which remembered dreamsdevelop most luxuriously. Paradoxical as it may sound, they are theproduct, not of our sleep, but of our waking. Such dreams belong toboth worlds, partly to the three-dimensional and partly to thefour-dimensional. While dreams are often only a hodge-podge ofdaytime experiences, their incredible rapidity, alien to thatexperience, gives us our first faint practicable intimation of ahigher development of time. 

TIME IN DREAMS

The unthinkable velocity of time in dreams may be inferred fromthe fact that between the moment of impact of an impressionat the sense-periphery and its reception at the center ofconsciousness--moments so closely compacted that we think of them assimultaneous--a coherent series of representations may take place, involving what seem to be protracted periods for their unfoldment. Every reader will easily call to mind dream experiences of thischaracter, in which the long-delayed dénouement was suggested andprepared for by some extraneous sense-impression, showing that theentire dream drama unfolded within the time it took that impressionto travel from the skin to the brain. 

Hasheesh dreams, because they so often occur during some momentarylapse from normal consciousness and are therefore measurable by itstime scale, are particularly rich in the evidence of the looping oftime. Fitzhugh Ludlow narrates, in _The Hasheesh Eater_, the dreamsthat visited him in the brief interval between two of twenty or moreawakenings, on his walk homeward after his first experience with thedrug. He says, "I existed by turns in different places and variousstates of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoonsof Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory ofthe coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle. Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest Ispread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded inthe spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds ofmusic and perfume. My soul changes to a vegetable essence, thrilledwith a strange and unimagined ecstasy. "

Earlier in the same evening, when he was forced to keep awake inorder not to betray his condition, the dream time-scale appears tohave imposed itself upon his waking consciousness with the followingcurious effect. A lady asked him some question connected with aprevious conversation. He says, "As mechanically as an automaton Ibegan to reply. As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones ofmy own voice, I became convinced that it was some one else who spoke, and in another world. I sat and listened: still the voice keptspeaking. Now for the first time I experienced that vast change whichhasheesh makes in all measurements of time. The first word of thereply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama; thelast left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back inthe past to date the commencement of the sentence. Its enunciationmight have occupied years. I was not in the same life which had heldme when I heard it begun. "

This well-known fact, that we cannot measure dreams by our time scale, proves that subjective time does not correspond with objective, andthat the "dream organ" of consciousness has a time scale of its own. If in our waking state we experience one kind of time, and indreams quite another, the solution of the mystery should be soughtin the _vehicle_ of consciousness, for clearly the limit ofimpressionability or power of response of the vehicle establishesthe time scale, just as the size of the body with relation toobjects establishes the space scale. Time must be different for theant and the elephant, for example, as space is different. 

Our sense of time is wholly dependent upon the rapidity with whichimpressions succeed one another. Were we capable of receiving onlyone impression an hour, like a bell struck every hour with a hammer, the ordinary term of life would seem very short. On the other hand, if our time sense were always as acute as it is in dreams, uncountedaeons would seem to be lived through in the interval betweenchildhood and old age. 

Imagine a music machine so cunningly constructed and adjusted as notonly to sound each note and chord in its proper sequence and relation, but to regulate also the duration of the sound vibration. If thismachine were operated in such a manner as to play, in a singlesecond of time, the entire overture of an opera which would normallyoccupy half an hour, we should hear only an unintelligible noise asecond long. This would be due to no defect in the _sound-producing_mechanism, but to the limitations of the _sound-receiving_ mechanism, our auditory apparatus. Could this be altered to conform to theunusual conditions--could it capture and convey to consciousnessevery note of the overture in a second of time--that second wouldseem to last half an hour, provided that every other criterion forthe measurement of duration were denied for the time being. 

Now dreams _seem_ long: we only discover afterwards and by accidenttheir almost incredible brevity. May we not--must we not--infer fromthis that the body is an organ of many stops and more than onekeyboard, and that in sleep it gives forth this richer music. Thetheory of a higher-dimensional existence during sleep accounts inpart for the great longing for sleep. "What is it that is muchdesired by man, but which they know not while possessing?" againasks Leonardo. "It is sleep, " is his answer. This longing for sleepis more than a physical longing, and the refreshment it brings isless of the flesh than of the spirit. It is possible to withstandthe deprivation of food and water longer and better than thedeprivation of sleep. Its recuperative power is correspondinglygreater. 

Experiments have been made with mature University students by whichthey have been kept awake ninety-six hours. When the experimentswere finished, the young men were allowed to sleep themselves out, until they felt they were thoroughly rested. All awoke from a longsleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restorehimself from his protracted vigil slept only one-third more timethan was regular with him. And this has been the experience over andover again of men in active life who have been obliged to keep awakefor long periods by the absolute necessities of the situation inwhich they have been placed. 

In this fact there is surely another hint of the sublimation of thetime sense during sleep. While it would be an unwarrantableassumption to suppose that the period of recuperation by sleep mustbe as long, or nearly as long, as the period of deprivation, theratio between the two presents a discrepancy so great that it wouldseem as though this might be due to an acceleration of the timeelement of consciousness. 

THE EASTERN TEACHING IN REGARD TO SLEEP AND DREAMS

In this matter of the wonder, the mystery, the enchantment, of sleepand dreams, the most modern psychology and the most ancient wisdommeet on common ground. Eastern wisdom casts such a light upon theproblems of subjectivity that it should not be lightly dismissed. For uncounted centuries Hindu-Aryan spiritual science has recognized, not one plane or condition of consciousness, but three; waking, dreaming, and deep sleep--the gross, the subtle and the pure. In thewaking state--that is, with the vehicle attuned to vibrate tomateriality--the individual self is as a captive in a citadel offlesh, aware of only so much of the universal life as chances toenact itself before the windows of his prison. In the dream state, when the more violent vibrations of the body are stilled in sleep, consciousness becomes active in its subtle (four-dimensional) vehicle, and ranges free throughout the ampler spaces of this subtler world. In deep sleep, consciousness reverts to its pure condition--theindividual self becomes the All-Self: the rainbow, no longerprismatic by reason of its refraction in materiality, becomes thepure white light; the melody of life resolves itself into theprimordial harmony; sequence becomes simultaneity, and Time, nolonger "besprent with seven-hued circumstance, " is swallowed up induration. 

"_There are two paths for him, within and without, and they bothturn back in a day and a night.... After having subdued by sleep allthat belongs to the body, he, not asleep himself, looks down uponthe sleeping. Having assumed light, he goes again to his place, thegolden person, the lonely bird_" UPANISHADS. 

SPACE IN DREAMS

However preposterous may appear to us this notion that the wakingstate, in which we feel ourselves most potent and alive, is reallyone of inhibition--that the world is only a "shoal of time"--it iscuriously borne out by the baffling phenomena of dreams and is inperfect accord with the Higher Space Hypothesis. The possibility ofshaking off the grip of sleep under appropriate circumstances, thefact that we can watch in our sleep, and awake at the right moment, that we can sleep and still watch and keep awake in regard tospecial objects and particular persons--these things forminsuperable difficulties for all those plausible, and apparentlyscientific, theories of sleep current in the West; but they fitperfectly with the Eastern idea that "he, not asleep himself, looksdown upon the sleeping. " And to the questions, "How, and from whence?"in the light of our hypothesis we may answer, "By the curvature oftime, consciousness escapes into the fourth dimension. "

Myers shows that he was in need of just this clue in order toaccount for some of the dream experiences recorded in _HumanPersonality_, since he asks for "an intermediate conception ofspace--something between space as we know it in the material worldand space as we imagine it to disappear in the ideal world. " Hesuggests that in dreams and trance there may be a clearer and morecomplete perception of space than is at present possible to us. Acorresponding sublimation of the time sense is no less necessary toaccount for time in dreams. Although we seem to triumph over spaceand time to such a tune as to eliminate them, dream experiences haveboth form and sequence. Now because form presupposes space, and timeis implicit in sequence, there arises the necessity for that"intermediate conception" of both space and time provided by ourhypothesis. 

THE PHENOMENON OF PAUSE

Let us conceive of sleep less narrowly than we are accustomed to:think of it only as one phase of the phenomenon of pause, ofarrested physical activity, universal throughout nature. The cellitself experiences fatigue and goes to sleep--"perchance to dream, "Modern experimental science in the domain of physiology andpsychology proves that we see and do not see, hear and do not hear, feel and do not feel, in successive instants. We are asleep, inother words, not merely hour by hour, but moment by moment--andperhaps age by age as well. 

Where is consciousness during these intervals, long or short, whenthe senses fail to respond to the stimuli of the external world? Itis somewhere else, awake to some other environment. Though we maynot be able to verify this from our own experience, there aremethods whereby it can be verified. Clairvoyance is one of these, hypnotism is another--that kind of hypnotism whereby an entrancedperson is made to give a report of his excursions and adventures inthe mysterious House of Sleep. It is a well-known fact that theseexperiences increase in intensity, coherence and in a certain sortof omniscience, directly in proportion to the depth of the trance. The revelations obtained in this way are sometimes amazing. Theinherent defect of this method of obtaining information is thepossibility of deception, and for that reason science still looksaskance at all evidence drawn from this source. But in essaying towrite a book about the fourth dimension from any aspect but themathematical, the author has put himself outside the pale oforthodox science, so he is under no compulsion to ignore a field sorich merely because it appears to be tainted by a certain amount offallibility and is even under suspicion of fraud. Diseased oysters, though not edible, produce pearls, and a pearl of great price is theobject of this quest. Let us glance, therefore, at the findings ofhypnotism and kindred phenomena. 

VII THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

THE FIELD OF PSYCHIC RESEARCH

It is difficult to divest the words hypnotism and clairvoyance ofcertain sordid and sinister associations. We are apt to think ofthem only as urban flora of the dust and dark, cultivated for profitby itinerant professors and untidy sibyls. Larger knowledge of thenight side of human nature, however, profoundly modifies this view. The invoked image is then of some hushed and studious chamber wherea little group of people sit attentive to the voice of oneentranced--listeners at the keyhole of the door to another world. This "news from nowhere, " garnered under so-called test conditionsand faithfully recorded, has grown by now to a considerableliterature, accessible to all--one with which every well-informedperson is assumed to have at least a passing acquaintance. 

A marked and constant characteristic of trance phenomena consists ofan apparent confusion between past, present and future. As in thegame of three-card monte, it appears impossible to tell in what orderthe three will turn up--_was, is_ and _will be_, lose their specialsignificance. Clairvoyance, in its time aspect, whether spontaneous, hypnotically induced, or self-induced, is susceptible ofclassification as post-vision, present vision, and prevision. Post-vision is that in which past events are not recollected merely, but seen or experienced. It is the past become present. Presentvision is clairvoyance of things transpiring elsewhere; the present, remote in space, but not in time. Prevision is the future in thepresent. These various orders of _clear-seeing_ transcend the limitsof the actual knowledge and experience of the seer. Thisclassification and these definitions are important only to us, towhom past, present, and future stand sharply differentiated inthought and in experience; not to the clairvoyant, who, though boundin body to our space and time, is consciously free in a world wherethese discriminations vanish. Why do they vanish? This question canbest be answered by means of a homely analogy. 

For a symbol of the flow of time in waking consciousness, imagineyourself in a railway carriage which jogs along a main-travelledline at a rate predetermined by the time-table. You approach, reachand pass such stations as are intersected by that particular railway, and you get a view of the landscape which every other traveler shares. Having once left a station, you cannot go back to it, nor can youarrive at places further along the line before the train itselftakes you there. Compare this with the freedom to do either of thesethings, and any number of others, if you suddenly change from thetrain to an automobile. Then, in effect, you have the freedom of anew dimension. In the one case, you must travel along a single lineat a uniform rate; in the other, you are able to strike out in anydirection and regulate your speed at will. You can go back to aplace after the train has left it; you can go forward to some placeahead, before the train arrives, or you can strike out into, andtraverse, new country. In short, your freedom, temporal and spatial, will be related to that of the train-bound traveler, somewhat as istrance consciousness to everyday waking life. 

MODIFYING THE PAST

Modern psychology has demonstrated the existence of a greatundercurrent of mental and emotional life, transcending theindividual's conscious experience, in which the most complexprocesses are carried on without the individual's consciousparticipation. The clearest symbol by which this fact may be figuredto the imagination is the one already presented: the comparison ofthe subjective field to a plane, in which the conscious experienceof the individual is represented by a single line. In sleep andtrance we have an augmented freedom of movement and so are able totravel here and there, backward and forward, not only among our own"disassociated memories" but in that greater and more mysteriousdemesne which comprehends what we call the future, as well as thepresent and the past. 

The profound significance of the disassociation and sublimation ofmemory by hypnotism, or by whatever other means the train ofpersonal experience and recollection can be thrown off the track, appears to have been ignored on its theoretical side--that is, asestablishing the return of time. It has cleverly been turned topractical account, however, in the treatment of disease. By a seriesof painstaking and brilliant experiments, the demonstration of therole played by "disassociated memories" in causing certainfunctional nervous and mental troubles has been achieved. It hasbeen shown that severe emotional shocks, frights, griefs, worries, may be--and frequently are--completely effaced from consciousrecollection, while continuing to be vividly remembered in thedepths of the subconscious. It has been shown that thence they may, and frequently do, exercise a baleful effect upon the whole organism, giving rise to disease symptoms, the particular type of which weredetermined by the victim's self-suggestion. As a preliminary toeffecting a permanent cure to such disorders, it is necessary to getat these disassociated memories and drag them back into the fulllight of conscious recollection. To get at them, medicalpsychologists make use of hypnotism, automatic writing, crystal-gazing--in short, of any method which will force an entranceinto that higher time-world, whereby the forgotten past may becomethe present. This accomplished, and the crucial moment recovered andtransfixed, the victim of the aborted opportunity is led to dealwith it as one may deal with the fluid, and may not deal with thefixed. Again his past is plastic to the operation of hisintelligence and his will. Here is glad news for mortals: the pastrecoverable and in a manner revocable!

Buddha taught that all sin is ignorance, and this teaching hasescaped oblivion because its truth has echoed in so many human hearts. We find that it is possible to deal with our old ignorances in thelight of later knowledge. What is this but the self-forgiveness ofsins? Subconsciously we may be always at work, mending the past. Repentance is the conscious recognition of some culmination of thisobscure process, when the heart is suffused with the inner gladnessof liberation from the payment of old karmic debts. Christ's words, "Thy sins are forgiven, " spoken to the woman who washed his feetwith her tears, sanctions this idea--that the past is remediable byknowledge and by love. 

Conceding this much, we must equally admit the possibility ofmoulding the future, of adjusting the will to the event which shallbefall. If the present moment can again intersect the stream of pastconscious experience, it may equally do so with regard to the future. This brings up the tremendous questions of free-will andfore-ordination. Upon these the Oriental doctrines of karma andreincarnation cast the only light by which the reason consents to beguided. As these doctrines are intimately related both to highertime and to trance revelations, some consideration of karma andreincarnation may appropriately find place here. 

KARMA AND REINCARNATION

Karma is that self-adjusting force in human affairs which restoresharmony disturbed by action. It is the moral law of compensation, and by its operation produces all conditions of life, misery andhappiness, birth, death, and re-birth; itself being both the causeand the effect of action. Its operation is indicated in the phrase, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. "

The essential idea of reincarnation is indicated in the followingquotation from the Upanishads: "And as a goldsmith, taking a pieceof gold, turns it into another, newer, and more beautiful shape, sodoes this Self, having thrown off this body and dispelled allignorance, make unto himself another and more beautiful shape. "

Reincarnation is the periodic "dip" of an immortal individual intomateriality for the working out of karma, after an interval, long orshort, spent under other conditions of existence. These alternationsconstitute the broader and deeper diapason of human life, of whichthe change from waking to sleeping represents the lesser, and themomentary awareness and unawareness of the sense mechanism tostimulation, the least. 

Thus a physical incarnation, in the broadest sense of the term, isthe interval, long or short, of the immersion of consciousness inmateriality. Under fatigue, the cell life withdraws; that is, itceases to respond to physical stimuli, and so passes out ofincarnation. When this occurs _en masse_ there transpires thathiatus of the personal consciousness called sleep, and while sleeplasts the personality is out of incarnation. After death--in theinterval between one life and the next--the specific memories of thepersonality fade out as in sleep, or rather, become latent, leavingthe soul, the permanent life-center, clear and colorless, amysterious focus of spiritual forces and affinities (the seeds ofkarma) ready for another sowing in the world of men. This centerof consciousness is thereupon drawn to the newly forming body, the life environment of which will rightly and justly--perhapsretributively--bring the tendencies and characteristics of theconscious center into objectivity again. Character is destiny, andcharacter is self-created. "All that we are is the result of what wehave thought. " But in the vast complexity and volume of human lifethere is a constant production of forms, with all the varieties ofcharacteristics and capacities requisite to meet the needs of everysoul, thirsty for the destiny that awaits it; and here heredityplays its part. Beyond the individual soul is the world-soul, whichperiodically incarnates in the humanity of a planet, and beyond theworlds of a single system, suns and congeries of suns. 

The profound and pregnant doctrines of karma and reincarnation, hereso sketchily outlined, are but expansions of one of the fundamentalpropositions of all Eastern philosophical systems, that the effect isthe unfolding of the cause in time. 

To omit a consideration of karma and reincarnation in connectionwith higher time would be to force a passage and then not followwhere it leads. The idea of time curvature is implicit in the ideasof karma and reincarnation. For what is karma but the return of time, the flowering in the present of some seed sown elsewhere and long ago?And what is reincarnation but the major cycle of that sweep intoobjective existence and out again, of which the alternation betweenwaking and sleeping is the lesser counterpart?

COLONEL DE ROCHAS' EXPERIMENTS

During the past few years evidence has been accumulating that wenever really forget anything. We have rediscovered the memory of thesubconscious mind. It is generally known that in the mesmeric orsomnambulistic sleep things hopelessly beyond recall for thehabitual mind come to the surface, in fragments, or in whole series, as the case may be. It is perhaps news to some readers, however, that the memory of past lives has been recovered in this way. Thisbut confirms the Eastern secret teaching that could we remember ourdream experiences we should recover the knowledge of our pastincarnations. 

Among the achievements of Eastern hypnotism is the recovery of thememory of past births. Colonel de Rochas appears to have paralleledthis achievement in the West. Certain of his experiments have beenadmirably reported by Maurice Maeterlinck in the eighth chapter of_Our Eternity_. Maeterlinck's account, somewhat condensed, isgiven here, because it so well illustrates the liberation ofconsciousness from the tyranny of time as we conceive it. He says:

"First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is asavant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with ascientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into a hypnotic sleep and, bymeans of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course oftheir existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes theconsciousness, the character and the state of mind which hepossessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over thesame events, with their joys and their sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and hisrecovery. 

"Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. Thesubject is a girl of eighteen, called Joséphine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of Isére. By means of downward passes she isbrought back to the condition of a baby at its mother's breast Thepasses continue and the wonder-tale runs its course. Joséphine canno longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, whichseems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Joséphineno longer answers except by signs: _she is not yet born_. 'She isfloating in darkness. ' They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; andsuddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of anotherbeing, a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful and discontented old man. They question him. At first herefuses to answer, saying that 'of course he's there, and he'sspeaking;' that 'he sees nothing;' and 'he's in the dark. ' Theyincrease the number of passes and gradually gain his confidence. Hisname is Jean Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long beenailing and bedridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born atChampvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to schooluntil he was eighteen and served his time in the army with theSeventh Artillery at Besançon; and he describes his gay time there, while the sleeping girl makes gestures of twirling an imaginarymoustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but theessential facts), and dies at the age of seventy, after a longillness. 

"We now hear the dead man speak; and his posthumous revelations arenot sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason fordoubting their genuineness. He feels himself growing out of his body;but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidicbody, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. Helives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does notsuffer. At last, the night in which he is plunged is streaked with afew flashes of light. The idea comes to reincarnate himself and hedraws near to her who is to be his mother (that is, the mother ofJoséphine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon hegradually enters the child's body. Until about the seventh year, hisbody is surrounded by a sort of floating mist, in which he used tosee many things which he has not seen since. 

"The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean Claude. Amesmerization lasting nearly three-quarters of an hour, withoutlingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back tobabyhood. A fresh silence, a new limbo; and then, suddenly, anothervoice and an unexpected individual. This time it is an old woman whohas been very wicked; and so she is in great torment (she is dead, at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives gobackward and of course begin at the end). She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks at first in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of cavilling at every moment, as Jean Claude did. Her nameis Philoméne Carteron. 

"'By intensifying the sleep, ' adds Colonel de Rochas, whom I willnow quote, 'I induce the manifestations of a living Philoméne. Sheno longer suffers, seems very calm and always answers coldly anddistinctly. She knows that she is unpopular in the neighborhood, butno one is a penny the worse and she will be even with them yet. Shewas born in 1702; her maiden name was Philoméne Cherpigny; hergrandfather on the mother's side was called Pierre Machon and livedin Ozan. In 1732 she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carterton, bywhom she had two children, both of whom she lost. '"

Before her incarnation, Philoméne had been a little girl who died ininfancy. Previous to that, she was a man who committed murder, andit was to expiate this crime that she endured such suffering in thedarkness, and after her life as a little girl, when she had no timeto do wrong. Colonel de Rochas did not think it wise to carry thehypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and herparoxysms were painful to watch. He obtained analogous and even moresurprising results with other subjects. 

Maeterlinck's comments upon all this are of negligible value. Hepays a fine tribute to the theory of reincarnation. "There was nevera more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful andprobable creed, " he says: yet for all that, it is clear that he hasnot been at pains fully to inform himself of the Eastern teaching. 

Colonel de Rochas' success, and that of all other experimentersalong these lines, is due to their unconscious following of theEastern method. He himself says that he "avoided everything thatshould put the subject on a definite tack, "--that is, he refrainedfrom voluntary suggestion. 

Having referred so frequently and so familiarly to the Easternbelief in reincarnation, and hinted at a more solid foundation forthat belief than the single series of experiments above referred to, it would be unfair to the reader not to gratify his curiosity morefully in regard to these matters. In the light of our hypothesisthey take on an importance which justifies their furtherconsideration here. 

VIII THE EASTERN TEACHING

ORIENTAL PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS

Western physical science, pursued with ardor and devotion for thepast hundred years, has attained to a control over physical phenomenalittle short of magical, but in our understanding and mastery ofsubjective phenomena we are far behind those Eastern peoples whohave made these matters the subject of study and experiment forthousands of years. The informed Hindu, rightly or wrongly, regardsthe Western practice of hypnotism, both in its methods and in itsresults, with mingled horror and contempt. To him it is notdifferent from Black Magic, pernicious to operator and subject alike, since it involves an unwarrantable tyranny of the will on the partof the operator, and a dangerous submission to the obsession of aninvading will on the part of the subject. Eastern hypnotism--at itshighest and best--is profoundly different from Western, in that thesanctity of the individual is respected. Its aim is not to enslavethe will, but temporarily to emancipate consciousness, underfavorable circumstances, from its physical limitation. 

Eastern practical psychology and metaphysics can be understood onlythrough a knowledge of Eastern physics. These we would calltranscendental, since they recognize not one theatre of consciousness, but three: the gross, the subtle, and the pure. These correspond tothe material, the etherial, and the empyreal worlds of Greekphilosophy, and to the physical, astral, and mental planes of modernTheosophy. They may be thought of as universal substance in threedifferent octaves of vibration. Upon this, the trained will of manis able to act directly, for the reason that--as claimed byBalzac--it is a _living_ force. 

In Eastern hypnotism the gross vibrations of the physical vehicleare inhibited by the will of the operator, putting the body of thesubject to sleep, whereat the consciousness, free in its subtle body, awakens to a dimensionally higher world. The operator, by means ofquestions, reaps such profit as he may by following the "true dreams"of the entranced subject, scrupulously refraining from imposing hisown will further than is necessary to obtain the information which heseeks. The higher power of Eastern hypnotism, totally unknown in theWest, consists of inhibiting the subtle vibrations of the astralvehicle also, permitting the consciousness to revert to its"pure" condition. In these deep states of trance the subject is ableto communicate knowledges shut away from the generality ofmen--among them the knowledge of past births. 

THE SELF-RECOVERED MEMORY OF PAST BIRTHS

The strength of will necessary to accomplish this higher power ofhypnotism is achieved by arduous and long-continued exercises inconcentration, by the practice of a strict morality, and bysubmission to a physical regimen which few Occidentals would care toundergo. Severe as is this training, it is less so than that whichthe true Yogi imposes upon himself, and its fruits are less. Theachievement to which he addresses himself is far beyond that of themost accomplished hypnotist. The Yogi scorns all supernormal powers, even while possessing them. The Yogi, as the word implies--it meansliterally union--seeks to unite himself with his own higher self, theeternal and immortal part of his own nature, and the achievement ofthis brings with it the freedom of the three worlds at all times, and in full consciousness. As this involves an inward turning of themind and will, and the withdrawal from the ordinary active life ofaverage humanity, he alone is witness of his own success. "The restis silence. "

The knowledge of past births which may be obtained by thequestionable and cumbersome method of hypnotism is one of thewayside flowers which the Yogi may pluck, if he will, on his pathtowards perfection. There are definite rules for the attainment ofthis knowledge, and they conform so closely to Colonel de Rochas'method--save for the fact that operator and subject are one and nottwain--that it will be interesting to give them here. The ensuingpassage is from the _Vishuddhi Marga_, or _Path of Purity_, a workwritten some sixteen hundred years ago by the famous sage, Buddhaghosha, whose name signifies the Voice of Buddha, the revealerof Buddha's teachings. It is quoted in Charles Johnston's _TheMemory of Past Births_. 

"The devotee, then, who tries for the first time to call to mindformer states of existence, should choose a time after breakfast, when he has returned from collecting alms, and is alone and plungedin meditation, and has been absorbed in the four trances insuccession. On rising from the fourth trance, which leads to thehigher powers, he should consider the event which last took place, namely, his sitting down; next, the spreading of the mat; theentering of the room; the putting away of bowl and robe; his eating;his leaving the village; his going the rounds of the village for alms;his entering the village for alms; his departure from the monastery;his offering adoration in the courts of the shrine and of the Bodhitree; his washing the bowl; what he did between taking the bowl andrinsing his mouth; what he did at dawn; what he did in the middlewatch of the night; what he did in the first watch of the night. Thus he must consider what he did for a whole day and night, goingbackwards over it in reverse order. 

"In the same reverse order he must consider what he did the daybefore, the day before that, up to the fifth day, the tenth day, afortnight ago, a month ago, a year ago; and having in the samemanner considered the previous ten and twenty years, and so on up tothe time of his conception in this birth, he must then consider thename and form which he had at the moment of death in his last birth. But since the name and form of the last birth came quite to an end, and were replaced by others, this point of time is like thickdarkness, and difficult to be made out by the mind of any personstill deluded. But even such a one should not despair nor say: 'Ishall never be able to penetrate beyond conception, or take as theobject of my thought the name and form which I had in my last birth, at the moment of death, ' but he should again and again enter thetrance which leads to the higher powers, and each time he rises fromthe trance, he should again intend his mind upon that point of time. 

"Just as a strong man in cutting down a mighty tree to be used asthe peaked roof of a pagoda, if the edge of his axe be turned inlopping off the branches and twigs, will not despair of cutting downthe tree, but will go to an iron-worker's shop, have his axesharpened, return, and go on with his cutting; and if the edge ofhis axe be turned a second time, he will a second time have itsharpened, and return, and go on with his cutting; and since nothingthat he chopped once needs to be chopped again, he will in no longtime, when there is nothing left to chop, fell that mighty tree. Inthe same way the devotee rising from the trance which leads to thehigher powers, without considering what he has considered once, andconsidering only the moment of conception, in no long time willpenetrate beyond the moment of conception, and take as his objectthe name and form which he had at the moment of death, in his lastbirth. 

"His alert attention having become possessed of this knowledge, hecan call to mind many former states of existence, as, one birth, twobirths, three births, four births, five births, and so on, in thewords of the text. "

This quotation casts an interesting light upon Eastern monasticism. The Buddhist monasteries are here revealed as schools of practicalpsychology, the life of the monk a life of arduous and unceasinglabor, but labor of a sort which seems but idleness. The successive"initiations" which are the milestones on the "Path of Perfection"upon which the devotee has set his feet represent successiveemancipations of consciousness gained through work and knowledge. Their nature may best be understood by means of a fanciful analogy. 

RELEASE

If we assume that all life is conscious life, as much aware of itsenvironment as the freedom of movement of its life vehicle in thatenvironment permits, a corpuscle vibrating in a solid would have acertain sense of space and of movement in space gained from its ownexperience. Now imagine the solid, which is its world, to besubjected to the influence of heat. When the temperature reached acertain point the solid would transform itself into a liquid. To thecorpuscle all the old barriers would seem to be broken down; spacewould be different, time would be different, and its world adifferent place. Again, at another increase of temperature, when theliquid became a gas, the corpuscle would experience a furtheremancipation: it would possess a further freedom, with all the factsof its universe to learn anew. 

Each of these successive crises would constitute for it an initiation, and since the heat has acted upon it from within, causing anexpansion of its life vehicle, it would seem to itself to haveattained to these new freedoms through self-development. 

The parallel is now plain to the reader: the corpuscle is the Yogi, bent on liberation: the heat which warms him is the Divine Love, centered in his heart, his initiations are the successiveemancipations into higher and higher spaces, till he attainsNirvana--inherits the kingdom prepared for him from the foundationof the world. As latent heat resides in the corpuscle, so is _Release_hidden in the heart--release from time and space. The perception ofthis prompted the exultant apostrophe of Buddha, "Looking for themaker of this tabernacle, I have run through a course of many births, not finding him; and painful is birth again and again. But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen; thou shalt not make upthis tabernacle again. All thy rafters are broken, thy ridge-pole issundered; the mind, approaching the Eternal, has attained theextinction of all desires. "

Upon the mystery of Nirvana the Higher Space Hypothesis casts not alittle light. To "approach the Eternal" can only be to approach acondition where time is not. Because there is an escape from time inproportion as space dimensions are added to, and assimilated by, consciousness, any development involving this element of spaceconquest (and evolution is itself such a development) involves timeannihilation also. To be in a state of desire is to be conditionedby a limitation, because one can desire only that which one has notor is not. The extinction of a desire is only another name for thetranscending of a limitation--of all desires, of all limitations. Ifthese limitations are of space they are of time also; therefore isthe "approach to the Eternal" through the "extinction of all desire. "Christ said, "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar of the templeof my God, and he shall go no more out"--go out, that is, intoincarnation--into "time, besprent with seven-hued circumstance. "

Such are the testimonies of the world-saviors regarding the meansand end of liberation. Below them on the evolutionary ladder standthe mystics, earth-bound, but soul-free; below them, in turn, yetfar above common humanity, stand the men of genius, caught still inthe net of passion, but able, in their work, to reflect something ofthe glory of the supernal world. Let us consider, in the next twochapters, each of these in turn. 

IX THE MYSTICS

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

The mystic, however far removed he may be from Nietzsche's ideal ofthe Superman, nevertheless represents superhumanity in the domain ofconsciousness. By means of quotations, taken almost at random fromthe rich literature of mysticism, the author will attempt to showthat the consciousness of the mystic involves the awareness ofdimensionally higher worlds. The first group of quotations is culledfrom certain of the Sacred Books of Hermes Trismegistus. 

"_Comprehend clearly_" (says Hermes to Asclepios) "_that thissensible world is enfolded, as in a garment, by the supernal world_. "

We think of our three dimensional space, "the sensible world, " as_immersed_ in higher space; "enfolded as in a garment, " therefore. And we think of the objects of our world as having extension in adimensionally higher region, that "supernal world" in which thephenomena of this sensible world arise. For:

"_Celestial order reigns over terrestrial order: all that is doneand said upon earth has its origin in the heights, from which allessences are dispensed with measure and equilibrium: nor is thereanything which does not emanate from one above and return thither_"

THE PAGE AND THE PRESS

The idea of an all-embracing unity within and behind the seemingmanifoldness of life forms the ground rhythm of all inspiredliterature, sacred and profane alike. For clarity and conciseness itwould be difficult to improve upon the formulation of this ideacontained in the following fragment:

"_In the manifold unity of universal life the innumerableindividualities distinguished by their variations are, nevertheless, united in such a manner that the whole is one, and that everythingproceeds from unity_. 

"_For all things depend upon unity, or develop from it, and becausethey appear distant from one another it is believed that they aremany, whereas in their collectivity they form but one_. "

Now nothing so successfully resolves this paradox of the one and themany as the concept that the things of this world are embraced andunited in a dimensionally higher world in a manner analogous to thatin which all conic sections are embraced and united within the cone. A more elaborate and fanciful figure may serve to make this clearerto the mind. 

Conceive of this printed page as a plane world in which every letteris a person; every word a family; phrases and sentences, largercommunities and groups. These "innumerable individualities, distinguished by their variations" must needs seem to themselves as"distant from one another, " their very differences of form andarrangement a barrier to any superior unity. Yet all the while, solely by reason of this diversity, they are co-operating towards anend of which they cannot be aware. The mind of the reader unites andinterprets the letters into continuous thought, though they bevoiceless as stones to one another. Even so may our sad and stonyidentities spell out a world's word which we know not of, by reasonof our singularity and isolation. Moreover, in the electrotype block, the solid of which the printed page constitutes a plane presentment, all the letters are actually "united in such a manner that the wholeis one. " The metal that has moulded each into its significant formamalgamates them into a higher unity. So also the power that makesus separate is the same power that makes us one. 

THE SHIP AND ITS CAPTAIN

Here follows the lament of the souls awaiting incarnation:

 "_Behold the sad future in store for us--to minister to the wants of a fluctuating and dissoluble body! No more may our eyes distinguish the souls divine! Hardly through these watery spheres shall we perceive, with sighs, our ancestral heaven: at intervals even we shall cease altogether to behold it. By this disastrous sentence direct vision is denied to us; we can see only by the aid of the outer light; these are but windows that we possess--not eyes. Nor will our pain be less when we hear in the fraternal breathing of the winds with which no longer can we mingle our own, since ours will have for its dwelling, instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the breast_!"

That the soul--the so-called subliminal self--draws from a broader, deeper experience than the purely rational consciousness is acommonplace of modern psychology. Hinton conceives of the soul as_higher-dimensional_ with relation to the body, but so concernedwith the management and direction of its lower-dimensional vehicleas to have lost, for the time being, its orientation, thinking andmoving only in those ways of which the body is capable. The analogyhe uses, of a ship and its captain, is so happy, and the wholepassage has so direct a bearing upon the Hermetic fragment quoted, that it is given here entire. 

"I adopt the hypothesis that that which thinks in us has an ampleexperience, of which the intuitions we use in dealing with the worldof real objects are a part; of which experience, the intuition offour-dimensional forms and motions is also a part. The process weare engaged in intellectually is the reading of the obscure signalsof our nerves into a world of reality, by means of intuitionsderived from the inner experience. 

"The image I form is as follows: Imagine the captain of a modernbattleship directing its course. He has his charts before him; he isin communication with his associates and subordinates; can convey hismessages and commands to every part of the ship, and receiveinformation from the conning tower and the engine room. Now supposethe captain, immersed in the problem of the navigation of his shipover the ocean, to have so absorbed himself in the problem of thedirection of the craft over the plane surface of the sea that heforgets himself. All that occupies his attention is the kind ofmovement that his ship makes. The operations by which that movementis produced have sunk below the threshold of his consciousness; hisown actions, by which he pushes the buttons, gives the orders, areso familiar as to be automatic; his mind is on the motion of theship as a whole. In such a case we can imagine that he identifieshimself with the ship; all that enters his conscious thought is thedirection of its movement over the plane surface of the ocean. 

"Such is the relation, as I imagine it, of the soul to the body. Arelation which we can imagine as existing momentarily in the case ofthe captain is the normal one in the case of the soul with its craft. As the captain is capable of a kind of movement, an amplitude ofmotion, which does not enter into his thoughts with regard to thedirecting of the ship over the plane surface of the ocean, so thesoul is capable of a kind of movement, has an amplitude of motion, which is not used in its task of directing the body in thethree-dimensional region in which the body's activity lies. If forany reason it becomes necessary for the captain to considerthree-dimensional motions with regard to his ship, it would not bedifficult for him to gain the materials for thinking about suchmotions; all he has to do is to call experience into play. As far asthe navigation of the ship is concerned, however, he is not obligedto call on such experience. The ship as a whole simply moves on asurface. The problem of three-dimensional movement does notordinarily concern its steering. And thus with regard to ourselvesall those movements and activities which characterize our bodilyorgans are three-dimensional; we never need to consider the amplermovements. But we do more than use these movements of our body toeffect our aims by direct means; we have now come to the pass whenwe act indirectly on nature, when we call processes into play whichlie beyond the reach of any explanation we can give by the kind ofthought which has been sufficient for the steering of our craft as awhole. 

"When we come to the problem of what goes on in the minute and applyourselves to the mechanism of the minute, we find our habitualconceptions inadequate. The captain in us must wake up to his ownintimate nature, realize those functions of movement which are hisown, and in the virtue of his knowledge of them apprehend how todeal with the problems he has come to. "

 _The Fourth Dimension_. 

How more accurately and eloquently could "the captain in us, "momentarily aroused, give voice to his predicament, than in the words, "_Instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of thebreast_. "

DIRECT VISION

The "watery spheres" in the Hermetic fragment are of course the eyes, a mechanism inferior in many ways to the camera of man's own devising. The phenomena of clairvoyance make known a mode of vision which isconfined to no specific sense organ, approximating much more closelyto true perception than does physical sight. Mr. C. W. Leadbeater in_Clairvoyance_ specifically affirms that this higher power ofsight is four-dimensional. He says: "The idea of the fourthdimension as expounded by Mr. Hinton is the only one which gives anykind of explanation down here of astral vision ... Which lays everypoint in the interior of a solid body absolutely open to the gaze ofthe seer, just as every point of the interior of a circle lies opento the gaze of a man looking down upon it. " "I can see all around andevery way, " exclaims one of the psychometers reported in WilliamDenton's _The Soul of Things_. 

The "outer light" by which the physical eye is able to see objectsis sunlight. Upon this clairvoyant vision in no wise depends, involving, as it does, other octaves of vibration. We should be ableto receive ideas of this order without incredulity since the adventof "dark" photography and the ultra-violet microscope. By aid of thelatter, photographs are taken in absolute darkness, the lenses usedbeing transparent to light rays invisible to the eye, but activephotographically. 

The foregoing passages from _The Virgin of the World_ show aremarkable resemblance between the Hermetic philosophy and modernhigher-space thought. The parallelism is not less striking in thecase of certain other mystic philosophers of the East. 

PLATO'S SHADOW-WATCHERS

"Parmenides, " says Hinton, "and the Asiatic thinkers with whom he isin close affinity, propound a theory of existence which is in closeaccord with a conception of a possible relation between a higher anda lower-dimensional space. " He concludes, "Either one of two thingsmust be true, that four-dimensional conceptions give a wonderfulpower of representing the thought of the East, or that the thinkersof the East must have been looking at and regarding four-dimensionalexistence. "

It would not be difficult to re-state, in terms of our hypothesis, Plato's doctrine of an enduring archetypal world of ideas reflectedin a world of transitory images and appearances. Fortunately, Platohas relieved the author of that necessity by doing it himself in hiswonderful allegory of the shadow-watchers in _The Republic_. Thetrend of his argument is clear; as its shadow is to a solid object, so is the object itself to its archetypal idea. This is the mannerin which he presents this thought:

"Imagine a number of men living in an underground cavernous chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the entirelength of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from theirchildhood, with their legs and neck so shackled, that they areobliged to sit still and look straight forwards, because theirchains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: andimagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them, and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners, with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors putup in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit theirwonders. "

 "I have it, " he replied. 

"Also, figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind thiswall, and carrying with them statues of men, and images of otheranimals, wrought in wood, stone, and all kinds of materials, togetherwith various other articles, which overtop the wall; and, as youmight expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and otherssilent"

"You are describing a strange scene, and strange prisoners. "

"They resemble us, " I replied. "For let me ask you, in the firstplace, whether persons so confined could have seen anything ofthemselves or of each other, beyond the shadows thrown by the fireupon the part of the cavern facing them. "

"Certainly not, if you suppose them to have been compelled all theirlifetime to keep their heads unmoved. "

"And is not their knowledge of the things carried past them equallylimited?"

"Unquestionably it is. "

"And if they were able to converse with one another, do you notthink that they would be in the habit of giving names to the objectswhich they saw before them?"

"Doubtless they would. "

"Again: if their prison house returned an echo from the part facingthem, whenever one of the passers-by opened his lips, to what, letme ask you, could they refer the voice, if not to the shadow whichwas passing?"

"Unquestionably they would refer it to that. "

"Then surely such persons would hold the shadows of the manufacturedarticles to be the only realities. "

"Without a doubt they would. "

Plato (in the person of Socrates) then considers what would happenif the course of nature brought to the prisoners a release fromtheir fetters and a remedy for their foolishness, and concludes asfollows:

"Now this imaginary case, my dear Glaucon, you must apply in all itsparts to our former statements, by comparing the region which theeye reveals, to the prison-house, and the light of the fire thereinto the power of the sun; and if, by the upward ascent and thecontemplation of the upper world, you understand the mounting of thesoul in the intellectual region, you will hit the tendency of my ownsurmises ... The view which I take of the subject is to thefollowing effect. "

Briefly, the view taken is that the "Form of Good" perceived by themind is the source of everything that is perceived by the senses. This is equivalent to saying that the objects of our three-spaceworld are projections of higher-dimensional realities--that there isa supernal world related to this world as a body is related to theshadow which it casts. 

SWEDENBORG

Emerson, in his _Representative Men_, chose Swedenborg as therepresentative mystic. He accepted Swedenborg's way of looking atthe world as universally characteristic of the mystical temperament. The Higher Space Theory was unheard of in Swedenborg's day, nevertheless in his religious writings--thick clouds shot withlightning--the idea is implicit and sometimes even expressed, thoughin a terminology all his own. 

To Swedenborg's vision, as to Plato's, this physical world is aworld of ultimates, in all things correspondent to the casual world, which he names "heaven. " "_It is to be observed_, " he says, "_that the natural world exists and subsists from the spiritual world, just as an effect exists from its efficient cause_. "

According to Swedenborg, conditions in "heaven" are different fromthose in the world: space is different: distance is different He says, "_Space in heaven is not like space in the world, for space in theworld is fixed, and therefore measurable: but in heaven it is notfixed and therefore cannot be measured_. "

Herein is suggested a _fluidic_ condition, singularly in accord withcertain modern conceptions in theoretical physics. Commenting uponthe significance of Lobatchewsky's and Bolyai's work along the linesof non-Euclidian geometry, Hinton says, "By immersing the conceptionof distance in matter, to which it properly belongs, it promises tobe of the greatest aid in analysis, for the effective distance ofany two particles is the result of complex material conditions, andcannot be measured by hard and fast rules. "

The higher correlative of physical distance is a difference of stateor condition, according to the Norwegian seer. "_Those are far apartwho differ much_, " he says "_and those are near who differ little_. "Distance in the spiritual world, he declares, originates solely"_in the difference in the state of their minds, and in the heavenlyworld, from the difference in the state of their loves_. " Thisimmediately suggests the Oriental teaching that the place and humanenvironment into which a man is born have been determined by his ownthoughts, desires, and affections in anterior existences, and thatinstant by instant all are determining their future births. Thereader to whom the idea of reincarnation is repellent or unfamiliarmay not be prepared to go this length, but he must at least grantthat in the span of a single lifetime thought and desire determineaction, and consequently, position in space. The ambitious man goesfrom the village to the city; the lover of nature seeks the wilds;the misanthrope avoids his fellowmen, the gregarious man gravitatesto crowds. We seek out those whom we love, we avoid those whom wedislike; everywhere the forces of attraction and repulsion playtheir part in determining the tangled orbits of our every-day lives. In other words, the subjective, and (hypothetically) higher activityin every man records itself in a world of three dimensions as actionupon an environment. Thought expresses itself in action, and soflows outward into space. 

Observe how perfectly this fits in with Swedenborg's contention thatphysical remoteness has for its higher correspondence a differenceof love and of interest; and physical juxtaposition, a similarity ofthese. In heaven, he says, "Angels of similar character are as itwere spontaneously drawn together. " So would it be on earth, but forimpediments inherent in our terrestrial space. Swedenborg's angelsare men freed from these limitations. We suffer because the freething in us is hampered by the restrictions of a space to which itis not native. Reason sufficient for such restriction is apparent inthe success that crowns every effort at the annihilation of space, and the augmentation of power and knowledge that such effort brings. It would appear that a narrowing of interest and endeavor is alwaysthe price of efficiency. The angel is confined to "the narrow prisonof the breast" that it may react upon matter just as an axe isnarrowed to an edge that it may cleave. 

MAN THE SPACE-EATER

Man has been called the thinking animal. _Space-eater_ would be amore appropriate title, since he so dauntlessly and persistentlyaddresses himself to overcoming the limitations of his space. Torealize his success in this, compare, for example, the voyage ofColumbus' caravels with that of an ocean liner; or traveling bystage coach with _train de luxe_. Consider the telephone, the phonograph, the cinematograph, from the standpoint ofspace-conquest--and wireless telegraphy which sends forth messagesin every direction, over sea and land. Most impressive of all arethe achievements in the domain of astronomy. One by one the sky hasyielded its amazing secrets, till the mind roams free among the stars. The reason why there are to-day so many men braving death in the airis because the conquest of the third dimension is the task to whichthe Zeit-Geist has for the moment addressed itself, and theseintrepid aviators are its chosen instruments--sacrificial pawns inthe dimension-gaining game. 

All these things are only the outward and visible signs of the angel, incarnate in a world of three dimensions, striving to realize higherspatial, or heavenly, conditions. This spectacle, for example, of amillionaire hurled across a continent in a special train to bepresent at the bedside of a stricken dear one, may be interpreted asthe endeavor of an incarnate soul to achieve, with the aid of humaningenuity applied to space annihilation, that which, discarnate, itcould compass without delay or effort. 

THE WITHIN AND WITHOUT

In Swedenborg's heaven "_all communicate by the extension of thesphere which goes forth from the life_ _of every one. The sphere oftheir life is the sphere of their affections of love and hate_. "

This is as fair a description of thought transference and itsnecessary condition as could well be devised, for as in wirelesstelegraphy, its mechanical counterpart, it depends upon synchronismof vibration in a "sphere which goes forth from the life of every one. "Thought transference and kindred phenomena in which all categoriesof space and time lose their significance baffle our understandingbecause they appear to involve the idea of being in two places--inmany places--at once, a thing manifestly at variance with our ownconscious experience. It is as though the pen point should suddenlybecome the sheet of paper. But strange as are these matters andmysterious as are their method, no other hypothesis so well explainsthem as that they are higher-dimensional experiences of the self. Wehave the universal testimony of all mystics that the attainment ofmystical consciousness is by inward contemplation--turning the mindback upon itself. Swedenborg says, "_It can in no case be said thatheaven is outside of any one, but it is within him for every angelparticipates in the heaven around him by virtue of the heaven whichis within him_. " Christ said, "_The Kingdom of Heaven is within you_, "and there is a saying attributed to Him to the effect that "_Whenthe outside becomes the inside, then the Kingdom of Heaven is come_. "These and such arcane sayings as "_Know Thyself_" engraved upon thelintels of ancient temples of initiation, powerfully suggest thepossibility that by penetrating to the center of our individualconsciousness we expand outwardly into the cosmic consciousness asthough _in_ and _out_ were the positive and negative of a newdimension. By exerting a force in the negative direction upon aslender column of water in a hydraulic press, it is possible toraise in the positive direction a vast bulk of water with which thatcolumn, through the mechanism of the press, is connected. This isbecause both columns, the little and the big, enclose one body offluid. The attainment of higher states of consciousness is potentialin every one, for the reason that the consciousness of a greaterbeing flows through each individual. 

INTUITION AND REASON

There is the utmost unanimity in the testimony of the mystics thatthe world without and the world within are but different aspects ofthe same reality--"_The eye with which I see God is the same eye withwhich He sees me_. " They never weary of the telling of thesolidarity and invisible continuity of life, the inclusion not onlyof the minute in the vast, but of the vast in the minute. We mayaccept this form of perception as characteristic of consciousness inits free state. Its instrument is the _intuition_, which divinesrelations between diverse things through a perception of unity. Theinstrument of the purely mundane consciousness, on the other hand, is the _reason_, which dissevers and dissects phenomena, diviningunity through correlation. Now if physical phenomena, in all theirmanifoldness, are lower-dimensional projections, upon alower-dimensional space, of a higher unity, then reason andintuition are seen to be two modes of one intelligence, engaged inapprehending life from below (by means of the reason) through itsdiversity, and from above (by means of intuition) through its unity. 

Those who recognize in the intuition a valid organ of knowledge, aredisposed to exalt it above the reason, but at our present state ofevolution, and given our environment, it would seem that the reasonis the more generally useful faculty of the two. In that unfolding, that manifesting of the higher in the lower--which is the idea thefour-dimensionalist has of the world--the painstaking, minute, methodical action of the reasoning mind applied to phenomenaachieves results impossible to Pisgah-sighted intuition. The power, peculiar to the reason, of isolating part after part from the wholeto which it belongs, and considering them thus isolated, makespossible in the end a synthesis in which the whole is not merelyglimpsed, but known to the last detail. 

The method of the reason is symbolized in so trifling a thing as thedealing out one by one of a pack of cards and their reassembling. The pack has been made to show forth its content by a process ofdisruption--of slicing. Similarly, if a scientist wants to gain athorough comprehension of a complicated organism, he dissects it, orsubmits it to a process of slicing, studying each slice separatelyunder the microscope while keeping constantly in mind the relationof one slice to another. This amounts to nothing less than reducinga thing from three dimensions to two, in order to know it thoroughly. Now the flux of things corresponds to the four-dimensional aspect ofthe world, and with this the reason finds it impossible to deal. AsBergson has so well shown, the reason cuts life into countlesscross-sections: a thing must be dead before it can be dissected. This is why the higher-dimensional aspect of life, divined by theintuition, escapes rational analysis. 

THE COIL OF LIFE

Swedenborg's description of "the ascent and descent of forms" andthe "forces and powers" which flow therefrom, suggests, by reason ofthe increasing amplitude and variety of form and motion, aprogression from space to space. This description is too long andinvolved to find place here, but its conclusion is as follows:

"_Such now is the ascent and descent of forms or substances in thegreatest, and in our least universe: similar also is the descent ofall forces and powers which flow from them. But all their perfectionconsists in the possibility and virtue of varying themselves, or ofchanging states, which possibility increases with their elevations, so that in number it exceeds all the series of calculations unfoldedby human minds, and still inwardly involved by them: whichinfinities finally become what is finite in the Supreme. Our ideasare merely progressions by variations of form, and thus by actualchanges of state_. "

His sense of the beauty and orderliness of the whole process, andhis despair of communicating it, find characteristic utterance inthe following passage:

"_If thou could'st discern, my beloved, how distinctly andordinately these forms are arranged and connected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of so many wonderful thingsconnected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of somany wonderful things conspiring into one, thou would'st fall down, from an inmost impulse, with sacred astonishment, and at the sametime pious joy, to perform an act of worship and of love before suchan architect_. "

In his description of the manner in which these forms cohere andsuccessively unfold, he introduces one of the basic concepts ofhigher space thought; namely, that in the "descent of forms" fromspace to space, that which in the higher exists all together--thatis, _simultaneously_--can only manifest itself in the lowerpiecemeal--that is, _successively_. He says:

"_Nothing is together in any texture or effect which was notsuccessively introduced; and everything is therein, according asorder itself introduces it: wherefore simultaneous order derives itsbirth, nature and perfection from successive orders, and the formeris only rendered perspicuous and plain by the latter.... What issupreme in things successive takes the inmost place in thingssimultaneous: thus things superior in order super-involve thingsinferior and wrap them together, that these latter may becomeexterior in the same order: by this method first principles, whichare also called simple, unfold themselves, and involve themselves inthings posterior or compound: wherefore every perfection of what isoutermost flows forth from inmost principles by their series: hencethy beauty, my daughter, the only parent of which is order itself_. "

This passage, like a proffered dish full of rare fruit, tempts themetaphysical appetite by the wealth and variety of its appeal; butnot to weary the reader, the author will content himself by theabstraction of a single plum. The plum in question is simply this(and the reader is asked to read the quotation carefully again): maynot every act, incident, circumstance in a human life be the"uncoiling" of a karmic aggregate? This coil of life may be thoughtof most conveniently in this connection as the _character_ of theperson, a character built up, or "successively introduced" inantecedent lives. The sequence of events resultant on its "unwinding"would be the destiny of the person--a destiny determined, necessarily, by past action. This concept gives a new and more eloquent meaningto the phrase "Character is destiny. " If we carry our thought nofurther, we are plunged into the slough of determinism--sheerfatality. But in each reincarnation, however predetermined every actand event, their reaction upon consciousness remains a matter ofdetermination--is therefore _self_-determined. We may not controlthe event, but our acceptance of it we may control. Moreover, each"unwinding" of the karmic coil takes place in a new environment, in aworld more highly organized by reason of the play upon it of thecollective consciousness of mankind. Though the same individualagain and again intersects the stream of mundane experience, it is anevolving ego and an augmenting stream. Therefore each life of agiven series forms a different, a more intricate, and a more amazingpattern: in each the thread is drawn from nearer the central energy, which is divine, and so shows forth more of the coiled power withinthe soul. 

X GENIUS

IMMANENCE

The greatest largess to the mind which higher thought brings is theconviction of a transcendent existence. Though we do not know thenature of this existence, except obscurely, we are assured of itsreality and of its immanence, through a growing sense that all thathappens to us is simply our relation to it. 

In our ant-like efforts to attain to some idea of the nature of thistranscendent reality, let us next avail ourselves of the helpafforded by the artist and the man of genius, too troubled by theflesh for perfect clarity of vision, too troubled by the spirit notto attempt to render or record the Pisgah-glimpses of theworld-order now and then vouchsafed. For the genius stands midwaybetween man and Beyond-man: in Nietzsche's phrase, "Man is a bridgeand not a goal. "

Of all the writers on the subject of genius, Schopenhauer is themost illuminating, perhaps because he suffered from it so. Accordingto him, the essence of genius lies in the perfection and energy ofits _perceptions_. Schopenhauer says, "He who is endowed with talentthinks more quickly and more correctly than others; but the geniusbeholds another world from them all, although only because he has amore profound perception of the world which lies before them also, in that it presents itself in his mind more objectively, andconsequently in greater purity and distinctness. " This profounderperception arises from his detachment: his intellect has to acertain extent freed itself from the service of his will, and leadsan independent life. So long as the intellect is in the service ofthe will, that which has no relation to the will does not exist forthe intellect; but along with this partial severance of the twothere comes a new power of perception, synthetic in its nature, acomplex of relationships not reproducible in _linear_ thought, forthe mind is oriented simultaneously in _many_ different directions. Of this order of perception the well-known case of Mozart is aclassic example. He is reported to have said of his manner ofcomposing, "I can see the whole of it in my mind at a single glance ... In which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all assuccession--the way it comes later--but all at once, as it were. Itis a rare feast! all the inventing and making goes on in me as in abeautiful strong dream. "

TIMELESSNESS

The inspirations of genius come from a failure of attention to life, which, all paradoxically, brings vision--the power to see lifeclearly and "see it whole. " Consciousness, unconditioned by time, "in a beautiful strong dream, " awakens to the perception of a worldthat is timeless. It brings thence some immortelle whose power ofsurvival establishes the authenticity of the inspiration. Howeverlocal and personal any masterpiece may be, it escapes by some potentmagic all geographical and temporal categories, and appears alwaysnew-born from a sphere in which such categories do not exist. 

No writer was more of his period than Shakespeare, yet howcontemporary he seems to each succeeding generation. Leonardo, in aperfect portrait, showed forth the face of a subtle, sensuous, andmocking spirit, against a background of wild rocks. It representsnot alone the soul-phase of the later Renaissance, but of everyindividual and of every civilization which on life's dangerous andorgiastic substratum has reared a mere garden of delight. Livinghearts throb to the music penned by the dead hand of Mozart and ofBeethoven; the clownings of Aristophanes arouse laughter in ourmusic halls; Euripides is as subtle and world-weary as any modern;the philosophies of Parminides and Heraclitus are recrudescent in thatof Bergson; and Plato discusses higher space under a different name. 

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL: BEAUTY

The second characteristic of works of genius is their indifferenceto all man-made moral standards. They are beyond all that goes bythe name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferentlyfor the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-mandiscovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and itscrown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tenderface of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings andmost magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of hisvillains and his clowns. To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness, beauty in disturbance. It injects the acid of irony into success, and distils the attar of felicity from failure. It teaches that theblows of fate are aimed, not at us, but at our fetters; that deathis swallowed up in victory, that the Hound of Heaven is none otherthan the Love of God. 

Though genius rebels at our moralities, it always submits itself tobeauty. Emerson says, "Goethe and Carlyle, and perhaps Novalis, havean undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing oncommon principles. Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfastmaintainers of the pure, ideal morality. But they worship it as thehighest beauty, their love is artistic. " And so it is throughout thewhole hierarchy of men of genius. "Beauty is Truth: Truth, Beauty, "is the motto which guides their far-faring feet, as they lead uswheresoever they will. With Victor Hugo, we follow, undisgusted, through the sewers of old Paris: his sense of beauty disinfects themfor us. With Balzac and Tolstoy we gaze unrevolted upon thenethermost depths of human depravity, discerning moral beauty eventhere; while with Virgil, Dante and Milton, we walk unscathed inHell itself. The _terribilita_ of Michaelangelo, the chaos andanarchy of Shakespeare at his greatest, as in Lear--these findexpression in perfect rhythms, so potent that we recognize them asproceeding from a supernal beauty, the beauty of that soul "fromwhich also cometh the life of man and of beast, and of the birds ofthe air and of the fishes of the sea. "

THE DAEMONIC

 "Unknown, --albeit lying near, -- To men the path to the Daemon sphere. "

But to men of genius--"Minions of the Morning Star"--the path is notunknown, and for this reason the daemonic element constantly showsitself in their works and in their lives. Dante, Cellini, Goethe, three men as unlike in the nature of their several gifts and intheir temperaments as could easily be named together, are drawn to acommon likeness through the daemonic gleam which plays and hoversover them at times. With William Blake it was a flame that wrappedhim round. Today no one knows how Brunelleschi was able to constructhis great dome without centering, nor how Michaelangelo could limnhis terrible figures on the wet plaster of the Sistine vault withsuch extraordinary swiftness and skill; but we have their testimonythat they invoked and received divine aid. Shakespeare, themaster-magician, is silent on this point of supernaturalassistance--as on all points--except as his plays speak for him;but how eloquently they speak! "The Tempest" is made up of thedaemonic; the murky tragedy of "Macbeth" unfolds under the guidanceof incarnate forces of evil which drive the hero to his doom andfinal deliverance in death: Hamlet sees and communes with the ghostof his father; in short, the supernatural is as much a part of theseplays as salt is part of the ocean. If from any masterpiece we couldabstract everything not strictly rational--every element of wonder, mystery, and enchantment--it would be like taking all of the unknownquantities out of an equation: there would be nothing left to solve. The mind of genius is a wireless station attuned to the vibrationsfrom the daemonic sphere; the works of genius fascinate and delightus largely for this reason: we, too, respond to these vibrations andare demonologists in our secret hearts. 

For the interest which we take in genius has its root in theinterest which we take in ourselves. Genius but utters experiencescommon to us all, records perceptions of a world-order which we toohave glimpsed. Love, hope, pain, sorrow, disappointment, ofteneffect that momentary purgation which enables consciousness tofunction independently of the tyrant will. These hours have for us anoetic value--"some veil did fall"--revealing visions rememberedeven unto the hour of death. 

"DEATH"

That "failure of attention to life" which begets inspiration in theman of genius comes, indeed, daily to every one, but without hisbeing able to profit by it. For what is sleep but a failure ofattention to life--so complete a failure that memory brings backnothing save that little caught in the net of dreams--yet even thislittle is so charged with creative energy as to give rise to thesaying that every man is a genius in his dreams. 

Death also is a failure of attention to life, the greatest that weknow, and poorest therefore in plunder from supernatural realms. Nevertheless reports of persons who have narrowly escaped death giveevidence at least that to those emancipated by death, life, viewedfrom some higher region of space, is perceived as a unity. When aman is brought face to face with death, the events of life passbefore the mind's eye in an instant, and he comes from such anexperience not only with deeper insight into himself, but into themeaning and purpose of life also. The faces of the dead, thoseparchments where are written the last testament of the departedspirit, bear an expression of solemn peace, sometimes of joy, sometimes of wonder: terror and agony are seldom written there, savewhen the fatal change comes in some painful or unnatural way. 

THE PLAY OF BRAHM

Inspiration, dreams, visions at the moment of death--these things wesay are _irrational_, and so in a sense they are. Bergson hascompared the play of reason upon phenomena to the action of acinematograph machine which reproduces the effect of motion byflashing upon the screen a correlated series of _fixed_ images. Inlike manner the reason dissects the flux of life and presents it toconsciousness part by part, but never as a whole. In supernormalstates however we may assume that with the breakdown of some barrierlife flows in like a tidal wave, paralyzing the reason, andtherefore presenting itself in an irrational manner to consciousness. Were reason equal to the strain put upon it under these circumstances, in what light might the phantasmagoria of human life appear? Mightit not be perceived as a representation, merely, of a supernal world, higher-dimensional in relation to our own? Just as a moving pictureshows us the round and living bodies of men and women as flatimages on a plane, enacting there some mimic drama, so on thethree-dimensional screen of the world men and women engaged inunfolding the drama of personal life may be but the images of soulsenacting, on higher planes of being, the drama of their own salvation. The reluctance of the American aborigine to be photographed is saidto have been due to his belief that something of his personality, his human potency, went into the image, leaving him by so much thepoorer from that time forth. Suppose such indeed to be the case:that the flat-man on the moving picture screen leads his little lifeof thought and emotion, related to the mental and emotional life ofthe living original as the body is related to its photographiccounterpart. In similar manner the potencies of the higher self, thedweller in higher spaces, may flow into and express themselves in andthrough us. We may be images in a world of images; our thoughtsshadows of archetypal ideas, our acts a shadow-play upon theluminous screen of material existence, revealing there, howeverimperfectly, the moods and movements of a higher self in a higherspace. 

The saying, "All the world's a stage, " may be true in a senseShakespeare never intended. It formulates, in effect, the oldest ofall philosophical doctrines, that contained in the Upanishads ofBrahma, the Enjoyer, who takes the form of a mechanically perfectuniverse in order to read his own law with eyes of his own creation. "He thought: 'Shall I send forth worlds?' He sent forth these worlds. "To the question, "What worlds?" the Higher Space Hypothesis makesanswer, "Dimensional systems, from lowest to highest, each one a_representation_ of the one next above, where it stands _dramatized_, as it were. This is the play of Brahm; endlessly to dissever, intime and space, and to unite in consciousness, like the geometricianwho discovers every ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola, in the conewhere all inhere. "

The particular act of the drama of unfolding consciousness uponwhich the curtain is now upfurled is that wherein we discover theworld to be indeed a stage, a playground for forces masquerading asforms: "they have their exits and their entrances, " or, as expressedin the Upanishads, "All that goes hence (dies on earth) heavenconsumes it all; and all that goes thence (returns from heaven to anew life) the earth consumes it all. "

XI THE GIFT OF FREEDOM

CONCEPT AND CONDUCT

A surgeon once remarked to the author that among his professionalassociates he had noticed an increasing awareness of the invisible. This he claimed was manifest in the fact that the young men educatedsince the rise of bacteriological science were more punctilious inthe matter of extreme personal cleanliness and the sterilization oftheir instruments than the older and often more accomplishedsurgeons whose habits in these matters had been formed before thegeneral sense of an _invisible_ menace had become acute. 

This anecdote well illustrates the unconscious reaction of newconcepts upon conduct. Preoccupation with the problems of spacehyper-dimensionality cannot fail to produce profound changes in ourethical outlook upon life and in our attitude towards our fellowbeings. The nature of these changes it is not difficult to forecast. 

Although higher-space thought makes painfully clear our limitations, it nevertheless leads to the perception that these very limitationsare inhibited powers. In this way it supplies us with a workablemethod whereby we may enter that transcendental world of which weglimpse so many vistas. This method consists in first becoming awareof a limitation, and then in forcing ourselves to dramatize theexperience that would be ours if the limitation did not affect us. We then discover in ourselves a power for transcending the limitation, and presently we come to live in the new mode as easily as in the old. Thought, conscious of its own limitations, leads to the New Freedom. "Become what thou art!" is the maxim engraved upon the lintel ofthis new Temple of Initiation. 

SELFLESSNESS

Higher-space speculation is an education in _selflessness_, for itdemands the elimination of what Hinton calls _self-elements_ ofobservation. The diurnal motion of the sun is an example of aself-element: it has nothing to do with the sun but everything to dowith the observer. The Ptolemaic system founded on this illusiontyrannized over the human mind for centuries, but who knows of howmany other illusions we continue to be victims--for the worst of aself-element is that its presence is never dreamed of until it isdone away with. The Theory of Relativity presents us with an effortto get rid of the self-element in regard to space and time. Aself-centered man cannot do full justice to this theory: it requiresof the mind a certain detachment, and the idea becomes clear inproportion as this detachment, this selflessness, is attained. 

So while it would be too much to claim that higher thought makes menunselfish, it at least cracks the hard shell in which theirselfishness abides. If a man disciplines himself to abdicate hispersonal point of view in thinking about the world he lives in, itmakes easier a similar attitude in relation to his fellow men. 

HUMILITY

One of the earliest effects of selfless thought is the exorcism ofall arrogance. The effort to dramatize the relation of an earthwormto its environment makes us recognize that its predicament is our own, different only in degree. We are exercising ourselves in humilityand meekness, but of a sort leading to a mastery that may well makethe meek the inheritors of the earth. Hinton was himself so meek aman that his desire did not rise to the height of expecting orlooking for the beautiful or the good: he simply asked for somethingto know. He despaired of knowing anything definitely and certainlyexcept arrangements in space. We have his testimony as to howabundantly this hunger and thirst after that right knowledge whichis righteousness was gratified. "All I want to do, " he says, "is to make this humble beginning of knowledge and show howinevitably, by devotion to it, it leads to marvellous andfar-distant truths, and how, by strange paths, it leads directlyinto the presence of some of the highest conceptions which greatminds have given us. "

Here speaks the blessed man referred to by the psalmist, "Whosedelight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditateday and night. " Abandoning a vain search after abstractions, andapplying his simple formula to life, Hinton found that it enabledhim to express the faith in his heart in terms conformable to reason;that it led back to, and illumined the teachings of every spiritualinstructor and inspirer of mankind. 

SOLIDARITY

That we are all members of one body, branches of one vine, is amatter of faith and of feeling; but with the first use of the weaponof higher thought the paradox of the one and the many is capable ofso clear and simple a resolution that the sublime idea of humansolidarity is brought down from the nebulous heaven of the mystic tothe earth of every day life. To our ordinary space-thought, men areisolated, distinct, each "an infinitely repellent particle, " but weconceive of space too narrowly. The broader view admits the ideathat men are related by reason of a superior union, that theirisolation is but an affair of limited consciousness. Applying thisconcept to conduct, we come to discern a literal truth in the wordsof the Master, "He who hath done it unto the least of these mychildren, hath done it unto me, " and "Where two or three aregathered together in my name. " If we conceive of each individual as a"slice" or cross-section of a higher being, each fragment isolatedby an inhibition of consciousness which it is moment by momentengaged in transcending, the sacrifice of the Logos takes on a newmeaning. This disseverance into millions of human beings is thateach may realize God in himself. Conceiving of humanity as God'sbroken body, we are driven to make peace among its members, and byrealization we become the Children of God. 

LIVE OPENLY

"_Blessed are the meek, " "Blessed are they that hunger and thirstafter righteousness. " "Blessed are the peacemakers_. " It would notbe impossible to trace a relation between higher space thought andthe other beatitudes also, but it will suffice simply to note thefact that the central and essential teaching of the Sermon on theMount, "Let your light shine before men" is implicit in theconviction of every one who thinks on higher space: he must _liveopenly_. By continual dwelling upon the predicament of the flat-man, naked, as it were, to observation from an eye which looks down uponhis plane, we come to realize our own exposure. In that large worldall that we think, or do, or imagine, lies open, palpable; there isno such thing as secrecy. Imbued with this idea, we begin to liveopenly because we must; but soon we come to do so because we desireit. In making toward one another our limited lives open and manifest, we treat each other in the service of truth as though we were allmembers of that higher world. We imitate, in our world, our trueexistence in a higher world, and so help to establish heavenlyconditions upon earth. 

NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL

The problem of ugliness and evil would seem at first thought to betotally unrelated to the subject of space hyperdimensionality, butthere is at least a symbolical relation. This was suggested to theauthor by the endeavor of two friends whose interests werepre-eminently mathematical to discover what certain four-dimensionalfigures would look like in three-dimensional space. They foundthat in a great number of cases these cross-sections, whenthus isolated, revealed little of the symmetry and beauty of theirhigher-dimensional archetypes. It is clear that a beautiful form ofour world, traversing a plane, would show nothing of its beauty tothe planeman, who lacked the power of perceiving it entire; for thesense of beauty is largely a matter of co-ordination. We give thenames of evil, chance, fate, ugliness, to those aspects of life andof the world that we fail to perceive in their true relations, inregard to which our power of correlation breaks down. Yet we oftenfind that in the light of fuller knowledge or subsequent experience, the fortune which seemed evil was really good fortune in the making, that the chance act or encounter was too momentous in itsconsequences to be regarded as other than ordained. 

The self-element plays a large part in our idea of good and evil, ugliness and beauty. "All things are as they seem to all. " Desire ofher will make any woman beautiful, and fear will exercise an absoluteinhibition upon the aesthetic sense. As we recede in time from events, they more and more emancipate themselves from the tyranny of ourpersonal prejudices and predilections, and we are able to perceivethem with greater clarity, more as they appear from the standpointof higher time and higher space. "Old, unhappy, far-off things, andbattles long ago" lose their poignancy of pain and take on thepoignancy of beauty. The memory of suffering endured is often thelast thing from which we would be parted, while humdrum happiness weare quite willing to forget. Because we realize completely only inretrospect, it may well be that the present exists chiefly for thesake of the future. Then let the days come with veiled faces, accepttheir gifts whose value we are so little able to appraise! There isa profound and practical truth in Christ's saying, "Resist not evil. "Honor this truth by use, and welcome destiny in however sinister aguise. 

THE IMMANENT DIVINE

In the fact of the limited nature of our space perceptions is founda connecting link between materialism and idealism. For, passingdeeper and deeper in our observation of the material world, thatwhich we at first felt as real passes away to become but the outwardsign of a reality infinitely greater, of which our realities areappearances only, and we become convinced of the existence of_an immanent divine. _ "In Him we live and move and have our being. "Our space is but a limitation of infinite "room to move about":"_In my Father's house are many mansions_. " Our time is but alimitation of infinite duration: "_Before Abraham was, I am_. " Oursense of space is the consciousness that we abide in Him; our senseof time is the consciousness that He abides in us. Both are modes ofapprehension of divinity--growing, expanding modes. In conceiving ofa space of more than three dimensions we prove that our relation toGod is not static, but dynamic. Christ said to the man who was sickof the palsy, "Rise, take up thy bed and walk. " The narrow conceptof three-dimensional space is a bed in which the human mind has lainso long as to become at last inanimate. The divine voice calls to usagain to demonstrate that we are alive. Thinking in terms of thehigher we issue from the tomb of materialism into the sunlight ofthat sane and life-giving idealism which is Christ's.