Flatland: A Romance of Many DimensionsAbbott, Edwin Abbott
Science
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Abbott, Edwin Abbott
Fourth dimension
FEELING is, among our Women and lower classes--about our upper classes
I shall speak presently--the principal test of recognition, at all
events between strangers, and when the question is, not as to the
individual, but as to the class. What therefore "introduction" is
among the higher classes in Spaceland, that the process of "feeling" is
with us. "Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend Mr.
So-and-so"--is still, among the more old-fashioned of our country
gentlemen in districts remote from towns, the customary formula for a
Flatland introduction. But in the towns, and among men of business,
the words "be felt by" are omitted and the sentence is abbreviated to,
"Let me ask you to feel Mr. So-and-so"; although it is assumed, of
course, that the "feeling" is to be reciprocal. Among our still more
modern and dashing young gentlemen--who are extremely averse to
superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of their
native language--the formula is still further curtailed by the use of
"to feel" in a technical sense, meaning, "to
recommend-for-the-purposes-of-feeling-and-being-felt"; and at this
moment the "slang" of polite or fast society in the upper classes
sanctions such a barbarism as "Mr. Smith, permit me to feel Mr. Jones."
Let not my Reader however suppose that "feeling" is with us the tedious
process that it would be with you, or that we find it necessary to feel
right round all the sides of every individual before we determine the
class to which he belongs. Long practice and training, begun in the
schools and continued in the experience of daily life, enable us to
discriminate at once by the sense of touch, between the angles of an
equal-sided Triangle, Square, and Pentagon; and I need not say that the
brainless vertex of an acute-angled Isosceles is obvious to the dullest
touch. It is therefore not necessary, as a rule, to do more than feel
a single angle of an individual; and this, once ascertained, tells us
the class of the person whom we are addressing, unless indeed he
belongs to the higher sections of the nobility. There the difficulty
is much greater. Even a Master of Arts in our University of Wentbridge
has been known to confuse a ten-sided with a twelve-sided Polygon; and
there is hardly a Doctor of Science in or out of that famous University
who could pretend to decide promptly and unhesitatingly between a
twenty-sided and a twenty-four sided member of the Aristocracy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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