By way of a beginning, proceed, by successive stages, from the
contemplation of the greatest thing conceivable to the contemplation
of the most minute, and note the space sequences revealed by this
shifting of the point of view.
The greatest thing we can form any conception of is the starry
firmament made familiar to the mind through the study of astronomy.
No limit to this vastitude has ever been assigned. Since the
beginning of recorded time, the earth, together with the other
planets and the sun, has been speeding through interstellar space at
the rate of 300,000,000 miles a year, without meeting or passing a
single star. A ray of light, travelling with a velocity so great as
to be scarcely measurable within the diameter of the earth's orbit,
takes years to reach even the nearest star, centuries to reach those
more distant. Viewed in relation to this universe of suns, our
particular sun and all its satellites--of which the earth is
one--shrinks to a point (a _physical_ point, so to speak--not
geometrical one).
The mind recoils from these immensities: let us forsake them, then,
for more familiar spaces, and consider the earth in its relation to
the sun. Our planet appears as a _moving_ point, tracing out a
_line_--a _one-space_--its path around the sun. Now let us remove
ourselves in imagination only far enough from the earth for human
beings thereon to appear as minute moving things, in the semblance,
let us say, of insects infesting an apple. It is clear that from
this point of view these beings have a freedom of movement in their
"space" (the surface of the earth), of which the larger unit is not
possessed; for while the earth itself can follow only a _line_, its
inhabitants are free to move in the two dimensions of the surface of
the earth.
Abandoning our last coign of vantage, let us descend in imagination
and mingle familiarly among men. We now perceive that these
creatures which from a distance appeared as though flat upon the
earth's surface, are in reality erect at right angles to its plane,
and that they are endowed with the power to move their members in
_three dimensions_. Indeed, man's ability to traverse the surface
of the earth is wholly dependent upon his power of three-dimensional
movement. Observe that with each transfer of our attention from
greater units to smaller, we appear to be dealing with a power of
movement in an additional dimension.
Looking now in thought not _at_ the body of man, but _within_ it, we
apprehend an ordered universe immensely vast in proportion to that
physical ultimate we name the electron, as is the firmament immensely
vast in proportion to a single star. It has been suggested that in
the infinitely minute of organic bodies there is a power of movement
in a _fourth_ dimension. If so, such four-dimensional movement may
be the proximate cause of the phenomenon of _growth_--of those
chemical changes and renewals whereby an organism is enabled to
expand in three-dimensional space, just as by a three-dimensional
power of movement (the act of walking) man is able to traverse his
two-dimensional space--the surface of the earth.
--AND BEYOND
Proceed still further. Behind such organic change--assumed to be
four-dimensional--there is the determination of some _will-to-live_,
which manifests itself to consciousness as thought and as desire.
Into these the idea of space does not enter: we think of them as in
_time_. But if there are developments of other dimensions of space,
thought and emotion may themselves be discovered to have space
relations; that is, they may find expression in the forms of _higher_
spaces. Thus is opened up one of those rich vistas in which the
subject of the fourth dimension abounds, but into which we
can only glance in passing. If there are such higher-dimensional
_thought-forms_, our normal consciousness, limited to a world of
three dimensions, can apprehend only their three-dimensional aspects,
and these not simultaneously, but successively--that is, in _time_.
According to this view, any unified series of _actions_--for example,
the life of an individual, or of a group--would represent the
straining, so to speak, of a thought-form through our _time_, as the
bodies subject to these actions would represent its straining
through our space.