Possibly a new apprehension of nature may come to us through the
practical, as distinguished from the mathematical and formal, study
of four dimensions. As a child handles and examines the objects with
which he comes in contact, so we can mentally handle and examine
four-dimensional objects. The point to be determined is this. Do we
find something cognate and natural to our faculties, or are we merely
building up an artificial presentation of a scheme only formally
possible, conceivable, but which has no real connection with any
existing or possible experience?
This, it seems to me, is a question which can only be settled by
actually trying. This practical attempt is the logical and direct
continuation of the experiment Plato devised in the “Meno.”
Why do we think true? Why, by our processes of thought, can we predict
what will happen, and correctly conjecture the constitution of the
things around us? This is a problem which every modern philosopher has
considered, and of which Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, to name a few,
have given memorable solutions. Plato was the first to suggest it.
And as he had the unique position of being the first devisor of the
problem, so his solution is the most unique. Later philosophers have
talked about consciousness and its laws, sensations, categories. But
Plato never used such words. Consciousness apart from a conscious being
meant nothing to him. His was always an objective search. He made man’s
intuitions the basis of a new kind of natural history.
In a few simple words Plato puts us in an attitude with regard to
psychic phenomena—the mind—the ego—“what we are,” which is analogous
to the attitude scientific men of the present day have with regard
to the phenomena of outward nature. Behind this first apprehension
of ours of nature, there is an infinite depth to be learned and
known. Plato said that behind the phenomena of mind that Meno’s slave
boy exhibited, there was a vast, an infinite perspective. And his
singularity, his originality, comes out most strongly marked in this,
that the perspective, the complex phenomena beyond were, according to
him, phenomena of personal experience. A footprint in the sand means a
man to a being that has the conception of a man. But to a creature that
has no such conception, it means a curious mark, somehow resulting from
the concatenation of ordinary occurrences. Such a being would attempt
merely to explain how causes known to him could so coincide as to
produce such a result; he would not recognise its significance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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