Flatland: A Romance of Many DimensionsAbbott, Edwin Abbott
Science
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Abbott, Edwin Abbott
Fourth dimension
In a still more obscure passage he now desires to disavow the Circular
or aristocratic tendencies with which some critics have naturally
credited him. While doing justice to the intellectual power with which
a few Circles have for many generations maintained their supremacy over
immense multitudes of their countrymen, he believes that the facts of
Flatland, speaking for themselves without comment on his part, declare
that Revolutions cannot always be suppressed by slaughter, and that
Nature, in sentencing the Circles to infecundity, has condemned them to
ultimate failure—“and herein,” he says, “I see a fulfilment of the
great Law of all worlds, that while the wisdom of Man thinks it is
working one thing, the wisdom of Nature constrains it to work another,
and quite a different and far better thing.” For the rest, he begs his
readers not to suppose that every minute detail in the daily life of
Flatland must needs correspond to some other detail in Spaceland; and
yet he hopes that, taken as a whole, his work may prove suggestive as
well as amusing, to those Spacelanders of moderate and modest minds
who—speaking of that which is of the highest importance, but lies
beyond experience—decline to say on the one hand, “This can never be,”
and on the other hand, “It must needs be precisely thus, and we know
all about it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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