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 of the two sides including their acute angle; the militia of the
Equilateral Triangles tricoloured in red, white, and blue; the mauve,
ultra-marine, gamboge, and burnt umber of the Square artillerymen
rapidly rotating near their vermillion 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 baton 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 those
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
disrespect 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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