Four Dimensional Vistas

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY Expectancy of freedom is the dominant note of to-day. Amid the crash of armies and the clash of systems we await some liberating stroke which shall release us from the old dreary thralldoms. As Nietzsche says, "It would seem as though we had before us, as a reward for all our toils, a country still undiscovered, the horizons of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to every country and every refuge of the ideal that man has ever known, a world so overflowing with beauty, strangeness, doubt, terror and divinity, that both our curiosity and our lust of possession are frantic with eagerness." Should a name be demanded for this home of freedom, there are those who would unhesitatingly call it The Fourth Dimension of Space. For such readers as may be ignorant of the amazing content of this seemingly meaningless phrase, any summary attempt at enlightenment will lead only to deeper mystification. To the question, where and what is the fourth dimension, the answer must be, it is here-in us, and all about us-in a direction toward which we can never point because at right angles to all the directions that we know. Our space cannot contain it, because it contains our space. No walls separate us from this demesne, not even the walls of our fleshly prison; yet we may not enter, even though we are already "there." It is the place of dreams, of living dead men: it is At the Back of the North Wind and Behind the Looking Glass. So might one go on, piling figure upon figure and paradox upon paradox, to little profit. The effective method is the ordered and deliberate one; therefore the author asks of his reader the endurance of his curiosity pending certain necessary preparations of the mind.

Excerpt from Four-Dimensional Vistas In 1823 Bolyai declared with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom of parallels, I will draw two lines through a given point, both of which will be parallel to a given line. The drawing of these lines led to the concept of the curvature of space, and this to the idea of higher Space. The recently developed Theory of Relativity has compelled the revision of the time concept as used in classical physics. One result of this has been to introduce the notion of curved time. These two ideas, of curved time and higher Space, by their very nature are bound to profoundly modify human thought. They loosen the bonds within which advancing knowledge has increasingly labored, they lighten the dark abysses of consciousness, they reconcile the discoveries of Western workers with the inspirations of Eastern dreamers; but best of all, they open vistas, they offer glimpses that may make us less forlorn. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"Four-Dimensional Vistas" by Claude Fayette Bragdon. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read.