Four-Dimensional Vistas | Page 3

brief, science deals only with phenomena, and its gift to man is power over his material environment.
MATHEMATICS
The gift of pure mathematics, on the other hand, is primarily to the mind and spirit: the fact that man uses it to get himself out of his physical predicaments is more or less by the way. Consider for a moment this paradox. Mathematics, the very thing common sense swears by and dotes on, contradicts common sense at every turn. Common sense balks at the idea of _less than nothing_; yet the minus quantity, which in one sense is less than nothing in that something must be added to it to make it equal to nothing, is a concept without which algebra would have to come to a full stop. Again, the science of quaternions, or more generally, a vector analysis in which the progress of electrical science is essentially involved, embraces (explicitly or implicitly) the extensive use of imaginary or impossible quantities of the earlier algebraists. The very words "imaginary" and "impossible" are eloquent of the defeat of common sense in dealing with concepts with which it cannot practically dispense, for even the negative or imaginary solutions of imaginary quantities almost invariably have some physical significance. A similar statement might also be made with regard to transcendental functions.
Mathematics, then, opens up ever new horizons, and its achievements during the past one hundred years give to thought the very freedom it seeks. But if science is dispassionate, mathematics is even more austere and impersonal. It cares not for teeming worlds and hearts insurgent, so long as in the pure clarity of space, relationships exist. Indeed, it requires neither time nor space, number nor quantity. As the mathematician approaches the limits already achieved by study, the colder and thinner becomes the air and the fewer the contacts with the affairs of every day. The Promethean fire of pure mathematics is perhaps the greatest of all in man's catalogue of gifts; but it is not most itself, but least so, when, immersed in the manifoldness of phenomenal life, it is made to serve purely utilitarian ends.
INTUITION
Common sense, immersed in the mere business of living, knows no more about life than a fish knows about water. The play of reason upon phenomena dissects life, and translates it in terms of inertia. The pure logic of mathematics ignores life and disdains its limitations, leading away into cold, free regions of its own. Now our desire for freedom is not to vibrate in a vacuum, but to live more abundantly. Intuition deals with life directly, and introduces us into life's own domain: it is related to reason as flame is related to heat. All of the great discoveries in science, all of the great solutions in mathematics, have been the result of a flash of intuition, after long brooding in the mind. Intuition illumines. Intuition is therefore the light which must guide us into that undiscovered country conceded by mathematics, questioned by science, denied by common sense--The Fourth Dimension of Space.
OUR SENSE OF SPACE
Space has been defined as "room to move about." Let us accord to this definition the utmost liberty of interpretation. Let us conceive of space not alone as room to move ponderable bodies in, but as room to think, to feel, to strike out in unimaginable directions, to overtake felicities and knowledges unguessed by experience and preposterous to common sense. Space is not measurable: we attribute dimensionality to space because such is the method of the mind; and that dimensionality we attribute to space is progressive because progression is a law of the mind. The so-called dimensions of space are to space itself as the steps that a climber cuts in the face of a cliff are to the cliff itself. They are not necessary to the cliff: they are necessary only to the climber. Dimensionality is the mind's method of mounting to the idea of the infinity of space. When we speak of the fourth dimension, what we mean is the fourth stage in the apprehension of that infinity. We might as legitimately speak of a fifth dimension, but the profitlessness of any discussion of a fifth and higher stages lies in the fact that they can be intelligently approached only through the fourth, which is still largely unintelligible. The case is like that of a man promised an increase of wages after he had worked a month, who asks for his second month's pay before he is entitled to the first.
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF SPACE
Without going deep into the doctrine of the ideality--that is, the purely subjective reality--of space, it is easy to show that we have arrived at our conception of a space of three dimensions by an intellectual process. The sphere of the senses is two-dimensional: except for the slight aid afforded by