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.
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.