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
The sight of a line of battle of twenty thousand Isosceles suddenly
facing about, and exchanging the sombre black of their bases for the
orange and purple of the two sides including their acute angle; the
militia of the Equilateral Triangles tricoloured in red, white, and blue;
the mauve, ultramarine, gamboge, and burnt umber of the Square
artillerymen rapidly rotating near their vermilion guns; the dashing and
flashing of the five-coloured and six-coloured Pentagons and Hexagons
careering across the field in their offices of surgeons, geometricians
and aides-de-camp—all these may well have been sufficient to render
credible the famous story how an illustrious Circle, overcome by the
artistic beauty of the forces under his command, threw aside his
marshal’s bâton and his royal crown, exclaiming that he henceforth
exchanged them for the artist’s pencil. How great and glorious the
sensuous development of these days must have been is in part indicated by
the very language and vocabulary of the period. The commonest utterances
of the commonest citizens in the time of the Colour Revolt seem to have
been suffused with a richer tinge of word or thought; and to that era we
are even now indebted for our finest poetry and for whatever rhythm still
remains in the more scientific utterance of these modern days.
§ 9.—_Of the Universal Colour Bill._
But meanwhile the intellectual Arts were fast decaying.
The Art of Sight Recognition, being no longer needed, was no longer
practised; and the studies of Geometry, Statics, Kinetics, and other
kindred subjects, came soon to be considered superfluous, and fell into
disrepute and neglect even at our University. The inferior Art of Feeling
speedily experienced the same fate at our Elementary Schools. Then the
Isosceles classes, asserting that the Specimens were no longer used nor
needed, and refusing to pay the customary tribute from the Criminal
classes to the service of Education, waxed daily more numerous and more
insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden which had
formerly exercised the twofold wholesome effect of at once taming their
brutal nature and thinning their excessive numbers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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