Expectancy of freedom is the dominant note of to-day. Amid the crash
of armies and the clash of systems we await some liberating stroke
which shall release us from the old dreary thralldoms. As Nietzsche
says, "It would seem as though we had before us, as a reward for all
our toils, a country still undiscovered, the horizons of which no
one has yet seen, a beyond to every country and every refuge of the
ideal that man has ever known, a world so overflowing with beauty,
strangeness, doubt, terror and divinity, that both our curiosity and
our lust of possession are frantic with eagerness."
Should a name be demanded for this home of freedom, there are those
who would unhesitatingly call it _The Fourth Dimension of Space_.
For such readers as may be ignorant of the amazing content of this
seemingly meaningless phrase, any summary attempt at enlightenment
will lead only to deeper mystification. To the question, where and
what is the fourth dimension, the answer must be, it is here--in us,
and all about us--in a direction toward which we can never point
because at right angles to all the directions that we know. Our
space cannot contain it, because it contains our space. No walls
separate us from this demesne, not even the walls of our fleshly
prison; yet we may not enter, even though we are already "there." It
is the place of dreams, of living dead men: it is _At the Back of
the North Wind_ and _Behind the Looking Glass_.
So might one go on, piling figure upon figure and paradox upon
paradox, to little profit. The effective method is the ordered and
deliberate one; therefore the author asks of his reader the
endurance of his curiosity pending certain necessary preparations of
the mind.