The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition by Cora Lenore Williams
page 8 of 18 (44%)
page 8 of 18 (44%)
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bodily movements are three-spaced. The great Peacock Moth wings a sure
course mateward to the mystification of the scientist; the dog finds the direct road home - his master cannot tell how; Mary Antin climbs to an education over difficulties apparently insurmountable; Rockefeller knows his goal and attains it, regardless of other moral worths. For these the way is certain. They can suffer no deflection since there are no relative values, no possible choices. Their purpose makes the road one-dimensional. That the majority of persons are still feeling their way over the surface of things is attested by the general mental ineptitude for the study of solid geometry. Depth and height play little part in our physical perception. For most of us the third dimension is practically unknown beyond the reach of a few feet. A Beachey soaring aloft - why all the bravado of curve and loop? Sooner or later he will fall to his death. Ay, verily! but his is a joyous martyrdom making for the evolution of consciousness. Not always shall we crawl like flies the surface of our globe! While a man's space-world is limited by his thought, it is, on the other hand, as boundless as his thought. That the world evolves with our consciousness, is at once the philosophy of 'Creative Evolution' and of the higher space theory. Our present spatial milieu has settled down to a seemingly three dimensional finality because our thought-form has become so habitual as to give rise to certain geometric axioms. All we need in order to come to a fourth-dimensional consciousness, said Henri Poincare, 'the greatest of moderns,' is a new table of distribution; that is, a breaking up of old associations of ideas and the forming of new relations - a simple matter were it not for our mental inertia. Lester Ward speculates that life remained aquatic for the vast periods that paleontology would indicate; Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous - a duration greater than all subsequent time - for the |
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