A Theory of the Mechanism of Survival: The Fourth Dimension and Its ApplicationsSmith, W. Whately (Walter Whately)
Philosophy
A Theory of the Mechanism of Survival: The Fourth Dimension and Its Applications
Smith, W. Whately (Walter Whately)
Fourth dimension; Parapsychology
I may as well repeat here that I do not for a moment expect that the
reader will have been able to visualise four-dimensional space. But
I do hope that he will have seen the force of the analogy and will
be prepared to admit that so far as we have gone at present four
dimensional space is by no means inconceivable though it may not be
distinctly imaginable.
The foregoing is really all that is necessary on the mathematical or
theoretical side for the understanding of the basic ideas with which
I am dealing but for the benefit of those readers who like that sort
of thing I have added a few simple propositions and extensions of the
analogy in the form of an appendix.
The only other question that need really concern us here is that of the
phenomena of _change_ in a two-dimensional world.
We have already seen that a cube laid on a flat surface will present
to a plane being, in that surface, the appearance of a square. It is
also clear that if it is pushed through the surface it will continue to
present the same appearance until it has passed right through, when it
will suddenly vanish away.
He would be unconscious of any movement on the part of the cube unless
there was some difference between the first and last sections which he
perceived.
If, for instance, the bottom face was red and the top face blue he
would be conscious of a colour change on the part of the square which
he perceived. It would start by being red and would pass through
various shades of purple till, just before its final disappearance, it
would be pure blue. But now suppose that it was pressed through his
surface not "normally" but corner wise as indicated in Fig. 6--that
is to say with one of its corners leading and one of its diagonals
vertical. The plane being would then see quite a different set of
figures. First would be a point; this would grow into a triangle which
would increase in size until it reached a certain maximum when it would
begin to develope three new sides at its corners which would grow, at
the expense of the original sides, until a regular hexagon was produced
when the reverse process would set in and the hexagon gradually change
back into a triangle which in turn would dwindle away and disappear.
It is easy to work out what would happen in the case of other solids,
_e.g._, Sphere, Cone, Tetrahedron, etc. All such changes would appear
very mysterious to the plane being if he had formed no conception of
three-dimensional space or the shapes of bodies therein.
[Illustration: _Fig. 6._]
Let us now extend this idea rather further.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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