The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition | Page 5

a solid.
Now you turn your attention from things to relations in the hope of
getting at truth in the large. A passage in Plato comes vividly to your
mind. 'For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to
proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason;
- this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while
following God, when, regardless of that which we now call being, she
raised her head up towards the true being.'
Henceforth the multiplicity that you seek is one of organization and has
nothing to do with number. 'Time was,' you proclaim, that
consciousness might sift out the irrelevant. As you pass from collection
to collection individual fact becomes prolonged into general law and
science dominates the field of thought. A thousand years are as a day
when subsumed by its laws. You look at the objects of man's creating
with new eyes. The displays are no longer contests of laborious
industry but of vision, and faith. You see that truth has made itself
manifest through the long repetition of the same fundamental theme.

That which is unique and personal you are surprised to find of less
value than the habit perfected by patient practice. The routine and
monotony of daily toil become glorified in the light that now falls
athwart your vision. You learn to substitute for your personal feeling
the common impersonal element felt by the many. Your concern is not
as formerly to recollect, but to symbolize. To this end you study frieze
and statuary and frequent lectures. Your sense of social solidarity
grows through mutual comprehension of the same truths.
And again that 'vexing, forward reaching sense of some more noble
permanence' urges you on. 'Time was;' you joyously affirm for man to
come to the knowledge of an eternal self. But that, your tradition and
education have led you to believe, is still yonder, worlds away. And
you image the soul in its quest passing from life to life as you are now
passing from building to building, from hall to hall. But glad the
thought - there will be courts wherein you may perhaps glimpse the
plan of the whole and so gather strength and purpose for another
housing. All at once you know that death has no fear for you and you
feel toward your present life as you do toward these Palaces of the
Mundane - the sooner compassed the better.
You pass from court to edifice and from edifice to court, marveling at
the symmetry of plan and structure. Unity, balance, and harmony
become manifest as spatial properties - you had been taught to regard
them as principles of art. You wonder if art itself may not be merely a
matter of right placing - the adjustment of a thing to its environment.
You are certain that this is so as each coign and niche offers you its
particular insight. Strange vagaries float through your mind - one's duty
to the inanimate things of one's possession; the house too large for the
personality of the owner; the right setting for certain idiosyncrasies;
character building as a constructive process; the ideal as the limit of an
infinite series - each pointing the way, as you think, to a different vista
of human outlook. What then your glad surprise to find these
converging toward one ideal synthesis. In anticipation of the splendor
you hasten on till earth shall have attained to heaven. There it stands -
'a structure brave,' the Palace of Art, the Temple of the Soul - and you
know you were made to be perfect too.
Now that you apprehend the plan of the whole, symmetry takes on a
vital significance for your thought. You try to recall what you learned

of it in geometry. There was a folding over, you remember, and a
fitting together 'congruence' you believe it was called. But that could
have no meaning for solids. Stop! a folding over? Why, that implies
another dimension! The two halves of a leaf can be brought together
only as one or the other is lifted out of the plane of the leaf into a third
dimension. So to bring two buildings into superposition when they are
alike except for a reverse order of parts, would necessitate a fourth
dimension and a turning inside out. Quick as the thought, the court you
are in is that - a building inside out!
Ah! you know now wherefor that wonderful uplifting sensation that
comes whenever you enter one of these beautiful inclosures. You have
passed into the fourth dimension of spatial realization. 'Time is past,'
you shout aloud, and laugh to find yourself on the inside of externality.
Cubism in architecture! Futurism, in very truth!
You