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 to my 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
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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