And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through
him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes
later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany
bookcase that stood against the wall.
There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the
first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The
second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book
that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.
Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach
its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he
remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had
been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand
either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent
of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the
school.
It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as
merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.
Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began
thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of
happier days swept over him.
Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written so
long ago the very words seemed strange and unreal:
_Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical
fate of this earth ... yes, even the universe. Billions of minds
seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets ...
and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and
have kept things as they were.... Destroy those minds and the
entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power,
will crumple and slip away like a column of sand...._
His eyes followed down the page:
_Yet this would have nothing to do with matter itself ... but
only with matter's form. For while the mind of man through long
ages may have moulded an imagery of that space in which he lives,
mind would have little conceivable influence upon the existence
of that matter. What exists in our known universe shall exist
always and can never be destroyed, only altered or transformed._
_But in modern astrophysics and mathematics we gain an insight
into the possibility ... yes probability ... that there are other
dimensions, other brackets of time and space impinging on the one
we occupy._
_If a pin is thrust into a shadow, would that shadow have any
knowledge of the pin? It would not, for in this case the shadow
is two dimensional, the pin three dimensional. Yet both occupy
the same space._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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