Flatland: A Romance of Many DimensionsAbbott, Edwin Abbott
Science
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Abbott, Edwin Abbott
Fourth dimension
Year by year the Soldiers and Artisans began more vehemently to
assert—and with increasing truth—that there was no great difference
between them and the very highest class of Polygons, now that they were
raised to an equality with the latter, and enabled to grapple with all
the difficulties and solve all the problems of life, whether Statical
or Kinetical, by the simple process of Colour Recognition. Not content
with the natural neglect into which Sight Recognition was falling, they
began boldly to demand the legal prohibition of all “monopolizing and
aristocratic Arts” and the consequent abolition of all endowments for
the studies of Sight Recognition, Mathematics, and Feeling. Soon, they
began to insist that inasmuch as Colour, which was a second Nature, had
destroyed the need of aristocratic distinctions, the Law should follow
in the same path, and that henceforth all individuals and all classes
should be recognized as absolutely equal and entitled to equal rights.
Finding the higher Orders wavering and undecided, the leaders of the
Revolution advanced still further in their requirements, and at last
demanded that all classes alike, the Priests and the Women not
excepted, should do homage to Colour by submitting to be painted. When
it was objected that Priests and Women had no sides, they retorted that
Nature and Expediency concurred in dictating that the front half of
every human being (that is to say, the half containing his eye and
mouth) should be distinguishable from his hinder half. They therefore
brought before a general and extraordinary Assembly of all the States
of Flatland a Bill proposing that in every Woman the half containing
the eye and mouth should be coloured red, and the other half green. The
Priests were to be painted in the same way, red being applied to that
semicircle in which the eye and mouth formed the middle point; while
the other or hinder semicircle was to be coloured green.
There was no little cunning in this proposal, which indeed emanated not
from any Isosceles—for no being so degraded would have angularity
enough to appreciate, much less to devise, such a model of
state-craft—but from an Irregular Circle who, instead of being
destroyed in his childhood, was reserved by a foolish indulgence to
bring desolation on his country and destruction on myriads of
followers.
On the one hand the proposition was calculated to bring the Women in
all classes over to the side of the Chromatic Innovation. For by
assigning to the Women the same two colours as were assigned to the
Priests, the Revolutionists thereby ensured that, in certain positions,
every Woman would appear as a Priest, and be treated with corresponding
respect and deference—a prospect that could not fail to attract the
Female Sex in a mass.
But by some of my Readers the possibility of the identical appearance
of Priests and Women, under a new Legislation, may not be recognized;
if so, a word or two will make it obvious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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