Scientific Romances (First Series)Hinton, Charles Howard
Philosophy
Scientific Romances (First Series)
Hinton, Charles Howard
Fourth dimension
Now what the man is in himself may be left undetermined; but he would be
more intimately connected with the æther than with the matter of his
body. And we may suppose that the æther itself is capable of movement
and alteration; that it moulds itself into new furrows and marks.
Thus the old woman smoking a pipe by the wayside years ago, and whom I
somehow so often remember, is not much different from me—we are both
corrugations of the same æther.
Now our consciousness is limited to our bodily surroundings. Yet it may
be supposed that in an action of our wills we, whatever we are (and for
the present let us suppose that we are a part of the æther), we may be
altering these corrugations of the æther. A single act of our wills,
when we really do act, may be a universal affair with quite infinite
relations. Thus it may be the immediate presentation to us of an
alteration proceeding from us of all that set of corrugations which
represents our future life; it may be the whole disposition and lie of
events, which are prepared for the earth to phonograph out, being
differently disposed. And it evidently is quite independent of the
particular furrows in which such alteration first occurs. That long
strip of æther which is a very humble individual may, by an act of
self-configuration, affect the neighbouring long strips and produce
great changes. At any rate the intrinsic value of the will is quite
independent of the kind of furrows along which any material human body
is proceeding.
_APPENDIX II._
It is a good plan in fixing our attention to give definite names to the
directions of space. Let U stand for up. Then the up direction we will
call the U direction, or simply U.
Then sideways, from left to right, we will call V, so that moving in the
V direction, or moving V, means moving to the right hand.
Then the away direction we will call W, so that a motion which goes away
from us we call a W motion, and its direction we call W.
Then any other direction which we suppose independent of these we will
call the X direction. Now the simple push or displacement takes place in
direction V, or left to right. It is turned into its image by turning in
the plane U V—_i.e._, the plane of the paper.
The wave motion takes up the directions U V, and it can be turned into
its image by a turning in the plane W V—_i.e._, by turning out of the
paper, as if the paper were folded over about the dotted line. Then
finally the twisting motion takes up the directions U V W, and can be
turned into its image by being turned in the plane V X. That is, if each
point is turned half-way round in this plane it becomes the
corresponding point in the image twist. Thus on the supposition of the
preceding pages, if a positively electrified particle could be turned in
4 space, it would become a negatively electrified particle.
_APPENDIX III._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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