Suppose there is a hollow cube, and a string is stretched across it from null to null, r, y, wh, as we may call the far diagonal point, how will this string appear to the plane being as the cube moves transverse to his plane?
Let us represent the cube as a number of sections, say 5, corresponding to 4 equal divisions made along the white line perpendicular to it.
We number these sections 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, corresponding to the distances along the white line at which they are taken, and imagine each section to come in successively, taking the place of the preceding one.
These sections appear to the plane being, counting from the first, to exactly coincide each with the preceding one. But the section of the string occupies a different place in each to that which it does in the preceding section. The section of the string appears in the position marked by the dots. Hence the slant of the string appears as a motion in the frame work marked out by the cube sides. If we suppose the motion of the cube not to be recognised, then the string appears to the plane being as a moving point. Hence extension on the unknown dimension appears as duration. Extension sloping in the unknown direction appears as continuous movement.
CHAPTER XII
THE SIMPLEST FOUR-DIMENSIONAL SOLID
A plane being, in learning to apprehend solid existence, must first of all realise that there is a sense of direction altogether wanting to him. That which we call right and left does not exist in his perception. He must assume a movement in a direction, and a distinction of positive and negative in that direction, which has no reality corresponding to it in the movements he can make. This direction, this new dimension, he can only make sensible to himself by bringing in time, and supposing that changes, which take place in time, are due to objects of a definite configuration in three dimensions passing transverse to his plane, and the different sections of it being apprehended as changes of one and the same plane figure.
He must also acquire a distinct notion about his plane world, he must no longer believe that it is the all of space, but that space extends on both sides of it. In order, then, to prevent his moving off in this unknown direction, he must assume a sheet, an extended solid sheet, in two dimensions, against which, in contact with which, all his movements take place.
When we come to think of a four-dimensional solid, what are the corresponding assumptions which we must make?
We must suppose a sense which we have not, a sense of direction wanting in us, something which a being in a four-dimensional world has, and which we have not. It is a sense corresponding to a new space direction, a direction which extends positively and negatively from every point of our space, and which goes right away from any space direction we know of. The perpendicular to a plane is perpendicular, not only to two lines in it, but to every line, and so we must conceive this fourth dimension as running perpendicularly to each and every line we can draw in our space.
And as the plane being had to suppose something which prevented his moving off in the third, the unknown dimension to him, so we have to suppose something which prevents us moving off in the direction unknown to us. This something, since we must be in contact with it in every one of our movements, must not be a plane surface, but a solid; it must be a solid, which in every one of our movements we are against, not in. It must be supposed as stretching out in every space dimension that we know; but we are not in it, we are against it, we are next to it, in the fourth dimension.