A New Era of Thought

by Charles Howard Hinton

But I have shown that the inner eye is not thus limited; that we can organize our power of seeing in higher space, and that we can form conceptions of realities in this higher space, just as we can in our ordinary space.

And this affords the groundwork for the perception and study of these other beings than man. Just as some mechanical means are necessary for the apprehension of our fellows in space, so a certain amount of mechanical education is necessary for the perception of higher beings in higher space.

Let us turn the current of our thought right round; instead of seeking after abstractions, and connecting our observations by ideas, let us train our sense of higher space and build up conceptions of greater realities, more absolute existences.

It is really a waste of time to write or read more generalities. Here is the grammar of the knowledge of higher being—let us learn it, not spend time in speculating as to whither it will lead us.

Yet one thing more. We are, with reference to the higher things of life, like blind and puzzled children. We know that we are members of one body, limbs of one vine; but we cannot discern, except by instinct and feeling, what that body is, what the vine is. If to know it would take away our feeling, then it were well never to know it. But fuller knowledge of other human beings does not take away our love for them; what reason is there then to suppose that a knowledge of the higher existences would deaden our feelings?

And then, again, we each of us have a feeling that we ourselves have a right to exist. We demand our own perpetuation. No man, I believe, is capable of sacrificing his life to any abstract idea; in all cases it is the consciousness of contact with some being that enables him to make the last human sacrifice. And what we can do by this study of higher space, is to make this consciousness, which has been reserved for a few, the property of all. Do we not all feel that there is a limit to our devotion to abstractions, none to beings whom we love. And to love them, we must know them.

Then, just as our own individual life is empty and meaningless without those we love, so the life of the human race is empty and meaningless without a knowledge of those that surround it. And although to some an inner knowledge of the oneness of all men is vouchsafed, it remains to be demonstrated to the many.

The perpetual struggle between individual interests and the common good can only be solved by merging both impulses in a love towards one being whose life lies in the fulfilment of each.

And this search, it seems to me, affords the needful supplement to the inquiries of one with whose thought I have been very familiar, and to which I return again, after having abandoned it for the purely materialistic views which seem forced upon us by the facts of science.

All that he said seemed to me unsupported by fact, unrelated to what we know.