Four-Dimensional Vistas

There are two notable emancipations of the mind from the tyranny of mere appearances that have received scant attention save from mathematicians and theoretical physicists.

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."

CONTENTS

I. THE QUEST OF FREEDOM

The Undiscovered Country--Miracles--The Failure of Common Sense--The Function of Science--Mathematics--Intuition--Our Sense of Space--The Subjectivity of Space--The Need of an Enlarged Space-Concept.

II. THE DIMENSIONAL LADDER

Learning to Think in Terms of Spaces--From the Cosmos to the Corpuscle--And Beyond--Evolution as Space-Conquest--Dimensional Sequences--Man the Geometer--Higher, and Highest, Space.

III. PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

Looking for the Greater in the Less--Symmetry--Other Allied Phenomena--Isomerism--The Orbital Motion of Spheres: Cell-Subdivision-- The Electric Current--The Greater Universe--A Hint from Astronomy-- Gravitation--The Ether of Space.

IV. TRANSCENDENTAL PHYSICS

Zöllner--Apparitions--Possession--Clairvoyance in Space--Clairvoyance in Time--Pisgah Sights of Life's Pageant.

V. CURVED TIME

Time from the Standpoint of Experiment and of Conscious Experience-- Relativity--The Spoon-Man--The Orbital Movement of Time--Materiality the Mirror of Consciousness--Periodicity.

VI. SLEEP AND DREAMS

Sleep--Dreams--Time in Dreams--The Eastern Teaching in regard to Sleep and Dreams--Space in Dreams--The Phenomenon of Pause.

VII. THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The Field of Psychic Research--Modifying the Past--Karma and Reincarnation--Colonel De Rochas' Experiments.

VIII. THE EASTERN TEACHING

Oriental Physics and Metaphysics--The Self-Recovered Memory of past Births--Release.

IX. THE MYSTICS

Hermes Trismegistus--The Page and the Press--The Ship and its Captain--Direct Vision--Plato's Shadow-Watchers--Swedenborg--Man, the Space-Eater--The Within and Without--Intuition and Reason--The Coil of Life.

X. GENIUS

Immanence--Timelessness--Beyond Good and Evil: Beauty--The Daemonic-- "A Dream and a Forgetting"--The Play of Brahm.

XI. THE GIFT OF FREEDOM

Concept and Conduct--Selflessness--Humility--Solidarity--Live Openly-- Non-Resistance to Evil--The Immanent Divine.

FOUR-DIMENSIONAL VISTAS

I THE QUEST OF FREEDOM

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."