A New Era of Thought

by Charles Howard Hinton

And so with higher-space arrangements. We cannot put them up actually, but we can say how they would look and be to the touch from various sides. And we can put up the actual appearances of them, not altogether, but as models succeeding one another; and by contemplation and active arrangement of these different views we call upon our inward power to manifest itself.

In preparing our general plan of work, it is necessary to make definite assumptions with regard to our world, our universe, or we may call it our space, in relation to the wider universe of four-dimensional space.

What our relation to it may be, is altogether undetermined. The real relationship will require a great deal of study to apprehend, and when apprehended will seem as natural to us as the position of the earth among the other planets does to us now.

But we have not got to wait for this exploration in order to commence our work of higher-space thought, for we know definitely that whatever our real physical relationship to this wider universe may be, we are practically in exactly the same relationship to it as the creature we have supposed living on the surface of a smooth sheet is to the world of threefold space.

And this relationship of a surface to a solid or of a solid, as we conjecture, to a higher solid, is one which we often find in nature. A surface is nothing more nor less than the relation between two things. Two bodies touch each other. The surface is the relationship of one to the other.

Again, we see the surface of water.

Thus our solid existence may be the contact of two four-dimensional existences with each other; and just as sensation of touch is limited to the surface of the body, so sensation on a larger scale may be limited to this solid surface.

And it is a fact worthy of notice, that in the surface of a fluid different laws obtain from those which hold throughout the mass. There are a whole series of facts which are grouped together under the name of surface tensions, which are of great importance in physics, and by which the behaviour of the surfaces of liquids is governed.

And it may well be that the laws of our universe are the surface tensions of a higher universe.

But these expressions, it is evident, afford us no practical basis for investigation. We must assume something more definite, and because more definite (in the absence of details drawn from experience), more arbitrary.