Looking at the light brown region we see that it increases in four
ways. Hence, the tesseracts of which it is composed increase in
number in each of four dimensions, and the shape they form does not
remain thin in any of the four dimensions. Consequently this region
becomes the solid content of the block of tesseracts, itself; it
is the real four-dimensional solid. All the other regions are then
boundaries of this light brown region. If we suppose the process
of increasing the number of tesseracts and diminishing their size
carried on indefinitely, then the light brown coloured tesseracts
become the whole interior mass, the three-coloured tesseracts become
three-dimensional boundaries, thin in one dimension, and form the
ochre, the brown, the light purple, the light green. The two-coloured
tesseracts become two-dimensional boundaries, thin in two dimensions,
_e.g._, the pink, the green, the purple, the orange, the light blue,
the light yellow. The one-coloured tesseracts become bounding lines,
thin in three dimensions, and the null points become bounding corners,
thin in four dimensions. From these thin real boundaries we can pass in
thought to the abstractions—points, lines, faces, solids—bounding the
four-dimensional solid, which in this case is light brown coloured, and
under this supposition the light brown coloured region is the only real
one, is the only one which is not an abstraction.
It should be observed that, in taking a square as the representation
of a cube on a plane, we only represent one face, or the section
between two faces. The squares, as drawn by a plane being, are not the
cubes themselves, but represent the faces or the sections of a cube.
Thus in the plane being’s diagram a cube of twenty-seven cubes “null”
represents a cube, but is really, in the normal position, the orange
square of a null cube, and may be called null, orange square.
A plane being would save himself confusion if he named his
representative squares, not by using the names of the cubes simply, but
by adding to the names of the cubes a word to show what part of a cube
his representative square was.
Thus a cube null standing against his plane touches it by null orange
face, passing through his plane it has in the plane a square as trace,
which is null white section, if we use the phrase white section to
mean a section drawn perpendicular to the white line. In the same way
the cubes which we take as representative of the tesseract are not
the tesseract itself, but definite faces or sections of it. In the
preceding figures we should say then, not null, but “null tesseract
ochre cube,” because the cube we actually have is the one determined by
the three axes, white, red, yellow.
There is another way in which we can regard the colour nomenclature of
the boundaries of a tesseract.
Consider a null point to move tracing out a white line one inch in
length, and terminating in a null point, see fig. 103 or in the
coloured plate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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