Charles Howard Hinton

“ Just as here and there on the face of a woman sits the divine spirit of beauty, so that all cannot but love who look—so, presenting itself to us in all this mingled scene of air and ocean, plain and mountain, is a being of such loveliness that, did we but know with one accord in one stream, all our hearts would be carried in a perfect and willing service. It is not that we need to be made different; we have but to look and gaze, and see that centre whereunto with joyful love all created beings move. ”

“ The æther is more solid than the vastest mountain chains, yet thinner than a leaf; undestroyed by the fiercest heat of any furnace, for the heat of the furnace is but its shaking and quivering; bearing all the heavenly bodies on it, and conveying their influence to all regions of what we call space.
And by some mysterious action it calls up magnetism from electricity; by its different movements it gives the different kinds of light their being.
Of itself untrammelled and unclogged by matter, it vibrates and shakes with the speed and rapidity of the vibrations of light. ”

“ The bonds of brotherhood with our fellow-men grow strong, for we know one common purpose. And through the exquisite face of nature shines the spiritual light that gives us a great and never-failing comrade.
Our task is a simple one—to lift from our mind that veil which somehow has fallen on us, to take that curious limitation from our perception, which at present is only transcended by inspiration. ”

“ According to Parmenides of the school of Elea the all is one, unmoving and unchanging. The permanent amid the transient—that foothold for thought, that solid ground for feeling on the discovery of which depends all our life—is no phantom; it is the image amidst deception of true being, the eternal, the unmoved, the one. ”

“ We are parts of a great being, in whose service, and with whose love, the utmost demands of duty are satisfied.
How can it not be a struggle, when the claims of righteousness mean diminished life,—even death,—to the individual who strives? And yet to a clear and more rational view it will be seen that in his extinction and loss, that which he loves,—that real being which is to him shadowed forth in the present existence of wife and child,—that being lives more truly, and in its life those he loves are his for ever. ”

“ And here, if we reflect on it, is the sign to us that we are limited in our notions of space—that we are really in a four-dimensional world.
Watching a ship as it recedes from the shore we see that it becomes hull down before it vanishes, and know that the earth is round. And no less certainly do our two hands, in their curious likeness and yet difference, afford to us a perpetual proof of our limitation, and indicate a larger world. ”

“ On the mind the only conceivable demand is to seek for facts. The rock on which so many systems of philosophy have come to grief is the attempt to put moral principles into nature. Our only duty is to accept what we find. Man is no more the centre of the moral world than he is of the physical world. Then relegate the intellect to its right position of dealing with facts of arrangement—it can appreciate structure—and let it simply look on the world and report on it. We have to choose between metaphysics and space thought. ”

“ Organized beings seem to us so complete that any addition to them would deface their beauty. Yet were we creatures confined to a plane, the outline of a Corinthian column would probably seem to be of a beauty unimprovable in its kind. We should be unable to conceive any addition to it, simply for the reason that any addition we could conceive would be of the nature of affixing an unsightly extension to some part of the contour. Yet, moving as we do in space of three dimensions, we see that the beauty of the stately column far surpasses that of any single outline. ”

“ All that occupies his attention is the kind of movement that his ship makes. The operations by which that movement is produced have sunk below the threshold of his consciousness, his own actions, by which he pushes the buttons, gives the orders, are so familiar as to be automatic, his mind is on the motion of the ship as a whole. In such a case we can imagine that he identifies himself with his ship; all that enters his conscious thought is the direction of its movement over the plane surface of the ocean. ”

“ To cause a motion is the name for the action of our soul on matter—a thing shrouded in mystery. To be the antecedent in a chain of movements is the fact which we can observe about any movement in the external world. ”

“ To acquire an absolute knowledge of a block of cubes, so that all self relations are cast out, means that one has to take the view of a higher being.
It suddenly comes before one, that the particular relations which are so fixed and important, and seem so absolutely sure when one begins the process of learning, are by no means absolute facts, but marks of a singular limitation, almost a degradation, on one’s own part. In the determined attempt to know the most insignificant object perfectly and thoroughly, there flashes before one’s eyes an existence infinitely higher than one’s own. ”

“ In none of his writings, as far as we know, did he carry it to its legitimate conclusion on the side of matter, but in the direction of the formal qualities he was led to his limiting conception of that existence of pure form which lies beyond all known determination of matter. The unmoved mover of all things is Aristotle’s highest principle. Towards it, to partake of its perfection all things move. The universe, according to Aristotle, is an active process—he does not adopt the illogical conception that it was once set in motion and has kept on ever since. ”

“ To a being standing on the rim of a plane world a straight line absolutely shuts out the prospect before him. If the straight line is infinite it cuts his world in two; he can never hope to get beyond it. ”

“ But in the lofty march of his reason he never loses sight of the whole; and that wherein our views differ from his lies not so much in a superiority of our point of view, as in the fact which he himself enunciates—that it is impossible for one principle to be valid in all branches of enquiry. The conceptions of one method of investigation are not those of another; and our divergence lies in our exclusive attention to the conceptions useful in one way of apprehending nature rather than in any possibility we find in our theories of giving a view of the whole transcending that of Aristotle. ”

“ To think of ourselves as any other than things in space and subject to material conditions, is absurd, it is absurd on either of two hypotheses. If we are really things in space, then of course it is absurd to think of ourselves as if we were not so. On the other hand, if we are not things in space, then conceiving in space is the mode in which that unknown which we are exists as a mind. Its mental action is space-conception, and then to give up the idea of ourselves as in space, is not to get a truer idea, but to lose the only power of apprehension of ourselves which we possess. ”

“ Let us now leave this supposition of framework and threads. Let us investigate the conception of a four-dimensional existence in a simpler and more natural manner—in the same way that a two-dimensional being should think about us, not as infinite in the third dimension, but limited in three dimensions as he is in two. A being existing in four dimensions must then be thought to be as completely bounded in all four directions as we are in three. All that we can say in regard to the possibility of such beings is, that we have no experience of motion in four directions. ”

“ But when I found that my knowledge was merely an empty pretence, that it was the vanity of being able to predict and foretell that stood to me in the place of an absolute apprehension of fact—when all my intellectual possessions turned to nothingness, then I was forced into that simple quest for fact, which, when persisted in and lived in, opens out to the thoughts like a flower to the life-giving sun.
It is indeed a far safer course, to believe that which appeals to us as noble, than simply to ask what is true ”

“ Thus we can imagine a plane world, in which all the variety of motion is the phenomenon of structures consisting of filamentary atoms traversed by a plane of consciousness. Passing to four dimensions and our space, we can conceive that all things and movements in our world are the reading off of a permanent reality by a space of consciousness. Each atom at every moment is not what it was, but a new part of that endless line which is itself. ”