A New Era of Thought

by Charles Howard Hinton

It is true that we must give up the precepts of religion as being the will of God; but then we shall learn that the will of God shows itself partly in the religious precepts, and comes to be more fully and more plainly known as an inward spirit.

And that difficulty, too, about what we may do and what we may not, vanishes also. For, if it is the same about our fellow-creatures as it is about the block of cubes, when we have thrown out the self-regard from our relationship to them, we shall feel towards them as a higher being than man feels towards them, we shall feel towards them as they are in their true selves, not in their outward forms, but as eternal loving spirits.

And then those instincts which humanity feels with a secret impulse to be sacred and higher than any temporary good will be justified—or fulfilled.

There are two tendencies—one towards the direct cultivation of the religious perceptions, the other to reducing everything to reason. It will be but just for the exponents of the latter tendency to look at the whole universe, not the mere section of it which we know, before they deal authoritatively with the higher parts of religion.

And those who feel the immanence of a higher life in us will be needed in this outlook on the wider field of reality, so that they, being fitted to recognize, may tell us what lies ready for us to know.

The true path of wisdom consists in seeing that our intellect is foolishness—that our conclusions are absurd and mistaken, not in speculating on the world as a form of thought projected from the thinking principle within us—rather to be amazed that our thought has so limited the world and hidden from us its real existences. To think of ourselves as any other than things in space and subject to material conditions, is absurd, it is absurd on either of two hypotheses. If we are really things in space, then of course it is absurd to think of ourselves as if we were not so. On the other hand, if we are not things in space, then conceiving in space is the mode in which that unknown which we are exists as a mind. Its mental action is space-conception, and then to give up the idea of ourselves as in space, is not to get a truer idea, but to lose the only power of apprehension of ourselves which we possess.

And yet there is, it must be confessed, one way in which it may be possible for us to think without thinking of things in space.

That way is, not to abandon the use of space-thought, but to pass through it.

When we think of space, we have to think of it as infinity extended, and we have to think of it as of infinite dimensions. Now, as I have shown in “The Law of the Valley,”[3] when we come upon infinity in any mode of our thought, it is a sign that that mode of thought is dealing with a higher reality than it is adapted for, and in struggling to represent it, can only do so by an infinite number of terms. Now, space has an infinite number of positions and turns, and this may be due to the attempt forced upon us to think of things higher than space as in space. If so, then the way to get rid of space from our thoughts, is, not to go away from it, but to pass through it—to think about larger and larger systems of space, and space of more and more dimensions, till at last we get to such a representation in space of what is higher than space, that we can pass from the space-thought to the more absolute thought without that leap which would be necessary if we were to try to pass beyond space with our present very inadequate representation in it of what really is.

[3] “Science Romances,” No. II.