Four-Dimensional Vistas

by Claude Fayette Bragdon

There is the utmost unanimity in the testimony of the mystics that the world without and the world within are but different aspects of the same reality—"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which He sees me." They never weary of the telling of the solidarity and invisible continuity of life, the inclusion not only of the minute in the vast, but of the vast in the minute. We may accept this form of perception as characteristic of consciousness in its free state. Its instrument is the intuition, which divines relations between diverse things through a perception of unity. The instrument of the purely mundane consciousness, on the other hand, is the reason, which dissevers and dissects phenomena, divining unity through correlation. Now if physical phenomena, in all their manifoldness, are lower-dimensional projections, upon a lower-dimensional space, of a higher unity, then reason and intuition are seen to be two modes of one intelligence, engaged in apprehending life from below (by means of the reason) through its diversity, and from above (by means of intuition) through its unity.

Those who recognize in the intuition a valid organ of knowledge, are disposed to exalt it above the reason, but at our present state of evolution, and given our environment, it would seem that the reason is the more generally useful faculty of the two. In that unfolding, that manifesting of the higher in the lower—which is the idea the four-dimensionalist has of the world—the painstaking, minute, methodical action of the reasoning mind applied to phenomena achieves results impossible to Pisgah-sighted intuition. The power, peculiar to the reason, of isolating part after part from the whole to which it belongs, and considering them thus isolated, makes possible in the end a synthesis in which the whole is not merely glimpsed, but known to the last detail.

The method of the reason is symbolized in so trifling a thing as the dealing out one by one of a pack of cards and their reassembling. The pack has been made to show forth its content by a process of disruption—of slicing. Similarly, if a scientist wants to gain a thorough comprehension of a complicated organism, he dissects it, or submits it to a process of slicing, studying each slice separately under the microscope while keeping constantly in mind the relation of one slice to another. This amounts to nothing less than reducing a thing from three dimensions to two, in order to know it thoroughly. Now the flux of things corresponds to the four-dimensional aspect of the world, and with this the reason finds it impossible to deal. As Bergson has so well shown, the reason cuts life into countless cross-sections: a thing must be dead before it can be dissected. This is why the higher-dimensional aspect of life, divined by the intuition, escapes rational analysis.

THE COIL OF LIFE

Swedenborg's description of "the ascent and descent of forms" and the "forces and powers" which flow therefrom, suggests, by reason of the increasing amplitude and variety of form and motion, a progression from space to space. This description is too long and involved to find place here, but its conclusion is as follows:

"Such now is the ascent and descent of forms or substances in the greatest, and in our least universe: similar also is the descent of all forces and powers which flow from them. But all their perfection consists in the possibility and virtue of varying themselves, or of changing states, which possibility increases with their elevations, so that in number it exceeds all the series of calculations unfolded by human minds, and still inwardly involved by them: which infinities finally become what is finite in the Supreme. Our ideas are merely progressions by variations of form, and thus by actual changes of state."

His sense of the beauty and orderliness of the whole process, and his despair of communicating it, find characteristic utterance in the following passage:

"If thou could'st discern, my beloved, how distinctly and ordinately these forms are arranged and connected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of so many wonderful things connected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of so many wonderful things conspiring into one, thou would'st fall down, from an inmost impulse, with sacred astonishment, and at the same time pious joy, to perform an act of worship and of love before such an architect."

In his description of the manner in which these forms cohere and successively unfold, he introduces one of the basic concepts of higher space thought; namely, that in the "descent of forms" from space to space, that which in the higher exists all together—that is, simultaneously—can only manifest itself in the lower piecemeal—that is, successively. He says:

"Nothing is together in any texture or effect which was not successively introduced; and everything is therein, according as order itself introduces it: wherefore simultaneous order derives its birth, nature and perfection from successive orders, and the former is only rendered perspicuous and plain by the latter…. What is supreme in things successive takes the inmost place in things simultaneous: thus things superior in order super-involve things inferior and wrap them together, that these latter may become exterior in the same order: by this method first principles, which are also called simple, unfold themselves, and involve themselves in things posterior or compound: wherefore every perfection of what is outermost flows forth from inmost principles by their series: hence thy beauty, my daughter, the only parent of which is order itself."