Flatland: A Romance of Many DimensionsAbbott, Edwin Abbott
Science
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Abbott, Edwin Abbott
Fourth dimension
I answer that though we cannot SEE angles, we can INFER them, and this
with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by necessity, and
developed by long training, enables us to distinguish angles far more
accurately than your sense of sight, when unaided by a rule or measure
of angles. Nor must I omit to explain that we have great natural
helps. It is with us a Law of Nature that the brain of the Isosceles
class shall begin at half a degree, or thirty minutes, and shall
increase (if it increases at all) by half a degree in every generation;
until the goal of 60 degrees is reached, when the condition of serfdom
is quitted, and the freeman enters the class of Regulars.
Consequently, Nature herself supplies us with an ascending scale or
Alphabet of angles for half a degree up to 60 degrees, Specimens of
which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land. Owing
to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and
intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the
Criminal and Vagabond Classes, there is always a vast superfluity of
individuals of the half degree and single degree class, and a fair
abundance of Specimens up to 10 degrees. These are absolutely
destitute of civic rights; and a great number of them, not having even
intelligence enough for the purposes of warfare, are devoted by the
States to the service of education. Fettered immovably so as to remove
all possibility of danger, they are placed in the class rooms of our
Infant Schools, and there they are utilized by the Board of Education
for the purpose of imparting to the offspring of the Middle Classes
that tact and intelligence of which these wretched creatures themselves
are utterly devoid.
In some States the Specimens are occasionally fed and suffered to exist
for several years; but in the more temperate and better regulated
regions, it is found in the long run more advantageous for the
educational interests of the young, to dispense with food, and to renew
the Specimens every month--which is about the average duration of the
foodless existence of the Criminal class. In the cheaper schools, what
is gained by the longer existence of the Specimen is lost, partly in
the expenditure for food, and partly in the diminished accuracy of the
angles, which are impaired after a few weeks of constant "feeling".
Nor must we forget to add, in enumerating the advantages of the more
expensive system, that it tends, though slightly yet perceptibly, to
the diminution of the redundant Isosceles population--an object which
every statesman in Flatland constantly keeps in view. On the whole
therefore--although I am not ignorant that, in many popularly elected
School Boards, there is a reaction in favour of "the cheap system" as
it is called--I am myself disposed to think that this is one of the
many cases in which expense is the truest economy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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