Four-Dimensional Vistas

by Claude Fayette Bragdon

Now nothing so successfully resolves this paradox of the one and the many as the concept that the things of this world are embraced and united in a dimensionally higher world in a manner analogous to that in which all conic sections are embraced and united within the cone. A more elaborate and fanciful figure may serve to make this clearer to the mind.

Conceive of this printed page as a plane world in which every letter is a person; every word a family; phrases and sentences, larger communities and groups. These "innumerable individualities, distinguished by their variations" must needs seem to themselves as "distant from one another," their very differences of form and arrangement a barrier to any superior unity. Yet all the while, solely by reason of this diversity, they are co-operating towards an end of which they cannot be aware. The mind of the reader unites and interprets the letters into continuous thought, though they be voiceless as stones to one another. Even so may our sad and stony identities spell out a world's word which we know not of, by reason of our singularity and isolation. Moreover, in the electrotype block, the solid of which the printed page constitutes a plane presentment, all the letters are actually "united in such a manner that the whole is one." The metal that has moulded each into its significant form amalgamates them into a higher unity. So also the power that makes us separate is the same power that makes us one.

THE SHIP AND ITS CAPTAIN

Here follows the lament of the souls awaiting incarnation:

"Behold the sad future in store for us—to minister to the wants of a fluctuating and dissoluble body! No more may our eyes distinguish the souls divine! Hardly through these watery spheres shall we perceive, with sighs, our ancestral heaven: at intervals even we shall cease altogether to behold it. By this disastrous sentence direct vision is denied to us; we can see only by the aid of the outer light; these are but windows that we possess—not eyes. Nor will our pain be less when we hear in the fraternal breathing of the winds with which no longer can we mingle our own, since ours will have for its dwelling, instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the breast!"

That the soul—the so-called subliminal self—draws from a broader, deeper experience than the purely rational consciousness is a commonplace of modern psychology. Hinton conceives of the soul as higher-dimensional with relation to the body, but so concerned with the management and direction of its lower-dimensional vehicle as to have lost, for the time being, its orientation, thinking and moving only in those ways of which the body is capable. The analogy he uses, of a ship and its captain, is so happy, and the whole passage has so direct a bearing upon the Hermetic fragment quoted, that it is given here entire.

"I adopt the hypothesis that that which thinks in us has an ample experience, of which the intuitions we use in dealing with the world of real objects are a part; of which experience, the intuition of four-dimensional forms and motions is also a part. The process we are engaged in intellectually is the reading of the obscure signals of our nerves into a world of reality, by means of intuitions derived from the inner experience.

"The image I form is as follows: Imagine the captain of a modern battleship directing its course. He has his charts before him; he is in communication with his associates and subordinates; can convey his messages and commands to every part of the ship, and receive information from the conning tower and the engine room. Now suppose the captain, immersed in the problem of the navigation of his ship over the ocean, to have so absorbed himself in the problem of the direction of the craft over the plane surface of the sea that he forgets himself. All that occupies his attention is the kind of movement that his ship makes. The operations by which that movement is produced have sunk below the threshold of his consciousness; his own actions, by which he pushes the buttons, gives the orders, are so familiar as to be automatic; his mind is on the motion of the ship as a whole. In such a case we can imagine that he identifies himself with the ship; all that enters his conscious thought is the direction of its movement over the plane surface of the ocean.

"Such is the relation, as I imagine it, of the soul to the body. A relation which we can imagine as existing momentarily in the case of the captain is the normal one in the case of the soul with its craft. As the captain is capable of a kind of movement, an amplitude of motion, which does not enter into his thoughts with regard to the directing of the ship over the plane surface of the ocean, so the soul is capable of a kind of movement, has an amplitude of motion, which is not used in its task of directing the body in the three-dimensional region in which the body's activity lies. If for any reason it becomes necessary for the captain to consider three-dimensional motions with regard to his ship, it would not be difficult for him to gain the materials for thinking about such motions; all he has to do is to call experience into play. As far as the navigation of the ship is concerned, however, he is not obliged to call on such experience. The ship as a whole simply moves on a surface. The problem of three-dimensional movement does not ordinarily concern its steering. And thus with regard to ourselves all those movements and activities which characterize our bodily organs are three-dimensional; we never need to consider the ampler movements. But we do more than use these movements of our body to effect our aims by direct means; we have now come to the pass when we act indirectly on nature, when we call processes into play which lie beyond the reach of any explanation we can give by the kind of thought which has been sufficient for the steering of our craft as a whole.

"When we come to the problem of what goes on in the minute and apply ourselves to the mechanism of the minute, we find our habitual conceptions inadequate. The captain in us must wake up to his own intimate nature, realize those functions of movement which are his own, and in the virtue of his knowledge of them apprehend how to deal with the problems he has come to."