The self-element plays a large part in our idea of good and evil, ugliness and beauty. "All things are as they seem to all." Desire of her will make any woman beautiful, and fear will exercise an absolute inhibition upon the aesthetic sense. As we recede in time from events, they more and more emancipate themselves from the tyranny of our personal prejudices and predilections, and we are able to perceive them with greater clarity, more as they appear from the standpoint of higher time and higher space. "Old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago" lose their poignancy of pain and take on the poignancy of beauty. The memory of suffering endured is often the last thing from which we would be parted, while humdrum happiness we are quite willing to forget. Because we realize completely only in retrospect, it may well be that the present exists chiefly for the sake of the future. Then let the days come with veiled faces, accept their gifts whose value we are so little able to appraise! There is a profound and practical truth in Christ's saying, "Resist not evil." Honor this truth by use, and welcome destiny in however sinister a guise.
THE IMMANENT DIVINE
In the fact of the limited nature of our space perceptions is found a connecting link between materialism and idealism. For, passing deeper and deeper in our observation of the material world, that which we at first felt as real passes away to become but the outward sign of a reality infinitely greater, of which our realities are appearances only, and we become convinced of the existence of an immanent divine. "In Him we live and move and have our being." Our space is but a limitation of infinite "room to move about": "In my Father's house are many mansions." Our time is but a limitation of infinite duration: "Before Abraham was, I am." Our sense of space is the consciousness that we abide in Him; our sense of time is the consciousness that He abides in us. Both are modes of apprehension of divinity—growing, expanding modes. In conceiving of a space of more than three dimensions we prove that our relation to God is not static, but dynamic. Christ said to the man who was sick of the palsy, "Rise, take up thy bed and walk." The narrow concept of three-dimensional space is a bed in which the human mind has lain so long as to become at last inanimate. The divine voice calls to us again to demonstrate that we are alive. Thinking in terms of the higher we issue from the tomb of materialism into the sunlight of that sane and life-giving idealism which is Christ's.
End of Project Gutenberg's Four-Dimensional Vistas, by Claude Fayette Bragdon