Four-Dimensional Vistas | Page 2

author asks of his reader the endurance of
his curiosity pending certain necessary preparations of the mind.
MIRACLES
Could one of our aviators have landed in ancient Athens, doubtless he
would have been given a place in the Greek Pantheon, for the old idea
of a demigod was a man with wings. Why, then, does a flying man so
little amaze us? Because we know about engines, and the smell of
gasoline has dulled our sense of the sublime. The living voice of a dead
man leaves us unterrified if only we can be sure that it comes from a
phonograph; but let that voice speak to us out of vacancy and we fall a
prey to the same order of alarm that is felt by a savage at the report of a
gun that he has never seen.
This illustration very well defines the nature of a miracle: it is a
manifestation of power new to experience, and counter to the current
thought of the time, Miracles are therefore always in order, they always
happen. It is nothing that the sober facts of to-day are more marvellous
than the fictions of Baron Munchausen, so long as we understand them:
it is everything that phenomena are multiplying, that we are unable to
understand. This increasing pressure upon consciousness from a new
direction has created a need to found belief on something firmer than a
bottomless gullibility of mind. This book is aimed to meet that need by
giving the mind the freedom of new spaces; but before it can even

begin to do so, the reader must be brought to see the fallacy of
attempting to measure the limits of the possible by that faculty known
as common sense. And by common sense is meant, not the appeal to
abstract reason, but to concrete experience.
THE FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE
Common sense had scarce had its laugh at Bell, and its shout of "I told
you so!" at poor Langley, when lo! the telephone became the world's
nervous system, and aeroplanes began to multiply like summer flies. To
common sense the alchemist's dream of transmuting lead into gold
seems preposterous, yet in a hundred laboratories radium is breaking
down into helium, and the new chemistry bids fair to turn the
time-honored jeer at the alchemists completely upside down. A wife
whose mind was oriented in the new direction effectually silenced her
husband's ridicule of what he called her credulity by reminding him
that when wireless telegraphy was first suggested he had exclaimed,
"Ah, that, you know, is one of the things that is not possible!" He was
betrayed by his common sense.
The lessons such things teach us are summed up in the reply of Arago,
the great savant, to the wife of Daguerre. She asked him if he thought
her husband was losing his mind because he was trying to make
permanent the image in a mirror. Arago is said to have answered, "He
who, outside of pure mathematics, says a thing is impossible, speaks
without reason."
Common sense neither leads nor lags, but is ever limited to the passing
moment: the common knowledge of to-day was the mystery and
enchantment of the day before yesterday, and will be the mere
commonplace of the day after to-morrow. If common sense can so little
anticipate the ordinary and orderly advancement of human knowledge,
it is still less able to take that leap into the dark which is demanded of it
now. The course of wisdom is therefore to place reliance upon reason
and intuition, leaving to common sense the task of guiding the routine
affairs of life, and guiding these alone.
THE FUNCTION OF SCIENCE
In enlisting the aid of reason in our quest for freedom, we shall be
following in the footsteps of mathematicians and theoretical physicists.
In their arduous and unflinching search after truth they have attained to
a conception of the background of phenomena of far greater breadth

and grandeur than that of the average religionist of to-day. As a
mathematician once remarked to a neo-theosophist, "Your idea of the
ether is a more material one than the materialist's own." Science has,
however, imposed upon itself its own limitations, and in this
connection these should be clearly understood.
Science is that knowledge which can be gained by exact observation
and correct thinking. If science makes use of any methods but these it
ceases to be itself. Science has therefore nothing to do with morals: it
gives the suicide his pistol, the surgeon his life-saving lance, but
neither admonishes nor judges them. It has nothing to do with emotion:
it exposes the chemistry of a tear, the mechanism of laughter; but of
sorrow and happiness it has naught to say. It has nothing to do with
beauty: it traces the