These are truisms. What have they to do, it may be asked, with the
idea of _higher_ spaces? They have everything to do with it, for in
achieving the enclosure of any portion of solid space the limit of
known dimensions has been reached without having come to any end.
More dimensions--higher spaces--are required to account for higher
things. All of the products of man's ingenuity are inanimate except
as he himself animates them. They remain as they were made, machines,
not organisms. They have no inherent life of their own, no power of
growth and renewal. In this they differ from animate creation
because the highest achievement of the creative faculty in man in a
mechanical way lacks the life principle possessed by the plant. And
as the most perfect machine is inferior in this respect to the
humblest flower that grows, so is the highest product of the
vegetable kingdom inferior to man himself, the maker of the machine;
for he can reflect upon his own and the world's becoming, while the
plant can only become.
What is the reason for these differences of power and function?
According to the Higher Space Hypothesis they are due to varying
potencies of movement in the secret causeways and corridors of space.
The higher functions of consciousness--volition, emotion,
intellection--may be in some way correlated with the higher powers
of numbers, and with the corresponding higher developments of space.
Thus would the difference between physics and metaphysics become a
difference of degree and not of kind. Evolution is to be conceived
of as a continuous pushing back of the boundary between
representation and reality, or as a conquest of space. We may
conceive of space as of an infinite number of dimensions, and of
consciousness as a moving--or rather as an expanding--point,
embracing this infinity, involving worlds, powers, knowledges,
felicities, within itself in everlasting progression.