Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions — John Shaqi
Flatland: A Romance of Many DimensionsAbbott, Edwin Abbott
Science
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Abbott, Edwin Abbott
Fourth dimension
But I must not give way to the temptation of enlarging on these topics.
The meanest mathematician in Spaceland will readily believe me when I
assert that the problems of life, which present themselves to the
well-educated—when they are themselves in motion, rotating, advancing or
retreating, and at the same time attempting to discriminate by the sense
of sight between a number of Polygons of high rank moving in different
directions, as for example in a ball-room or conversazione—must be of a
nature to task the angularity of the most intellectual, and amply justify
the rich endowments of the Learned Professors of Geometry, both Static
and Kinetic, in the illustrious University of Wentbridge, where the
Science and Art of Sight Recognition are regularly taught to large
classes of the _élite_ of the States.
It is only a few of the scions of our noblest and wealthiest houses, who
are able to give the time and money necessary for the thorough
prosecution of this noble and valuable Art. Even to me, a Mathematician
of no mean standing, and the Grandfather of two most hopeful and
perfectly regular Hexagons, to find myself in the midst of a crowd of
rotating Polygons of the higher classes, is occasionally very perplexing.
And of course to a common Tradesman, or Serf, such a sight is almost as
unintelligible as it would be to you, my Reader, were you suddenly
transported into our country.
In such a crowd you could see on all sides of you nothing but a Line,
apparently straight, but of which the parts would vary irregularly and
perpetually in brightness or dimness. Even if you had completed your
third year in the Pentagonal and Hexagonal classes in the University, and
were perfect in the theory of the subject, you would still find that
there was need of many years of experience, before you could move in a
fashionable crowd without jostling against your betters, whom it is
against etiquette to ask to “feel,” and who, by their superior culture
and breeding, know all about your movements, while you know very little
or nothing about theirs. In a word, to comport oneself with perfect
propriety in Polygonal society, one ought to be a Polygon oneself. Such
at least is the painful teaching of my experience.
It is astonishing how much the Art—or I may almost call it instinct—of
Sight Recognition is developed by the habitual practice of it and by the
avoidance of the custom of “Feeling.” Just as, with you, the deaf and
dumb, if once allowed to gesticulate and to use the hand-alphabet, will
never acquire the more difficult but far more valuable art of lip-speech
and lip-reading, so it is with us as regards “Seeing” and “Feeling.” None
who in early life resort to “Feeling” will ever learn “Seeing” in
perfection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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