The Fourth Dimension
9781465669001
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
There is nothing more indefinite, and at the same time more real, than that which we indicate when we speak of the “higher.” In our social life we see it evidenced in a greater complexity of relations. But this complexity is not all. There is, at the same time, a contact with, an apprehension of, something more fundamental, more real. With the greater development of man there comes a consciousness of something more than all the forms in which it shows itself. There is a readiness to give up all the visible and tangible for the sake of those principles and values of which the visible and tangible are the representation. The physical life of civilised man and of a mere savage are practically the same, but the civilised man has discovered a depth in his existence, which makes him feel that that which appears all to the savage is a mere externality and appurtenage to his true being. Now, this higher—how shall we apprehend it? It is generally embraced by our religious faculties, by our idealising tendency. But the higher existence has two sides. It has a being as well as qualities. And in trying to realise it through our emotions we are always taking the subjective view. Our attention is always fixed on what we feel, what we think. Is there any way of apprehending the higher after the purely objective method of a natural science? I think that there is. Plato, in a wonderful allegory, speaks of some men living in such a condition that they were practically reduced to be the denizens of a shadow world. They were chained, and perceived but the shadows of themselves and all real objects projected on a wall, towards which their faces were turned. All movements to them were but movements on the surface, all shapes but the shapes of outlines with no substantiality. Plato uses this illustration to portray the relation between true being and the illusions of the sense world. He says that just as a man liberated from his chains could learn and discover that the world was solid and real, and could go back and tell his bound companions of this greater higher reality, so the philosopher who has been liberated, who has gone into the thought of the ideal world, into the world of ideas greater and more real than the things of sense, can come and tell his fellow men of that which is more true than the visible sun—more noble than Athens, the visible state. Now, I take Plato’s suggestion; but literally, not metaphorically. He imagines a world which is lower than this world, in that shadow figures and shadow motions are its constituents; and to it he contrasts the real world. As the real world is to this shadow world, so is the higher world to our world. I accept his analogy. As our world in three dimensions is to a shadow or plane world, so is the higher world to our three-dimensional world. That is, the higher world is four-dimensional; the higher being is, so far as its existence is concerned apart from its qualities, to be sought through the conception of an actual existence spatially higher than that which we realise with our senses.
