Four-Dimensional Vistas

by Claude Fayette Bragdon

So while it would be too much to claim that higher thought makes men unselfish, it at least cracks the hard shell in which their selfishness abides. If a man disciplines himself to abdicate his personal point of view in thinking about the world he lives in, it makes easier a similar attitude in relation to his fellow men.

HUMILITY

One of the earliest effects of selfless thought is the exorcism of all arrogance. The effort to dramatize the relation of an earthworm to its environment makes us recognize that its predicament is our own, different only in degree. We are exercising ourselves in humility and meekness, but of a sort leading to a mastery that may well make the meek the inheritors of the earth. Hinton was himself so meek a man that his desire did not rise to the height of expecting or looking for the beautiful or the good: he simply asked for something to know. He despaired of knowing anything definitely and certainly except arrangements in space. We have his testimony as to how abundantly this hunger and thirst after that right knowledge which is righteousness was gratified. "All I want to do," he says, "is to make this humble beginning of knowledge and show how inevitably, by devotion to it, it leads to marvellous and far-distant truths, and how, by strange paths, it leads directly into the presence of some of the highest conceptions which great minds have given us."

Here speaks the blessed man referred to by the psalmist, "Whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditate day and night." Abandoning a vain search after abstractions, and applying his simple formula to life, Hinton found that it enabled him to express the faith in his heart in terms conformable to reason; that it led back to, and illumined the teachings of every spiritual instructor and inspirer of mankind.

SOLIDARITY

That we are all members of one body, branches of one vine, is a matter of faith and of feeling; but with the first use of the weapon of higher thought the paradox of the one and the many is capable of so clear and simple a resolution that the sublime idea of human solidarity is brought down from the nebulous heaven of the mystic to the earth of every day life. To our ordinary space-thought, men are isolated, distinct, each "an infinitely repellent particle," but we conceive of space too narrowly. The broader view admits the idea that men are related by reason of a superior union, that their isolation is but an affair of limited consciousness. Applying this concept to conduct, we come to discern a literal truth in the words of the Master, "He who hath done it unto the least of these my children, hath done it unto me," and "Where two or three are gathered together in my name." If we conceive of each individual as a "slice" or cross-section of a higher being, each fragment isolated by an inhibition of consciousness which it is moment by moment engaged in transcending, the sacrifice of the Logos takes on a new meaning. This disseverance into millions of human beings is that each may realize God in himself. Conceiving of humanity as God's broken body, we are driven to make peace among its members, and by realization we become the Children of God.

LIVE OPENLY

"Blessed are the meek," "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness." "Blessed are the peacemakers." It would not be impossible to trace a relation between higher space thought and the other beatitudes also, but it will suffice simply to note the fact that the central and essential teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, "Let your light shine before men" is implicit in the conviction of every one who thinks on higher space: he must live openly. By continual dwelling upon the predicament of the flat-man, naked, as it were, to observation from an eye which looks down upon his plane, we come to realize our own exposure. In that large world all that we think, or do, or imagine, lies open, palpable; there is no such thing as secrecy. Imbued with this idea, we begin to live openly because we must; but soon we come to do so because we desire it. In making toward one another our limited lives open and manifest, we treat each other in the service of truth as though we were all members of that higher world. We imitate, in our world, our true existence in a higher world, and so help to establish heavenly conditions upon earth.

NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL

The problem of ugliness and evil would seem at first thought to be totally unrelated to the subject of space hyperdimensionality, but there is at least a symbolical relation. This was suggested to the author by the endeavor of two friends whose interests were pre-eminently mathematical to discover what certain four-dimensional figures would look like in three-dimensional space. They found that in a great number of cases these cross-sections, when thus isolated, revealed little of the symmetry and beauty of their higher-dimensional archetypes. It is clear that a beautiful form of our world, traversing a plane, would show nothing of its beauty to the planeman, who lacked the power of perceiving it entire; for the sense of beauty is largely a matter of co-ordination. We give the names of evil, chance, fate, ugliness, to those aspects of life and of the world that we fail to perceive in their true relations, in regard to which our power of correlation breaks down. Yet we often find that in the light of fuller knowledge or subsequent experience, the fortune which seemed evil was really good fortune in the making, that the chance act or encounter was too momentous in its consequences to be regarded as other than ordained.