The turn of a
four-dimensional world is near, but the puzzle of science will ever
continue until their concepts reach the natural dimensions of visible
and invisible space--in its septenary completeness. "The Infinite and
the Absolute are only the names for two counter-imbecilities of the
human (uninitiated) mind;" and to regard them as the transmuted
"properties of the nature of things--of two subjective negatives
converted into objective affirmatives," as Sir W. Hamilton puts it, is
to know nothing of the infinite operations of human liberated spirit, or
of its attributes, the first of which is its ability to pass beyond the
region of our terrestrial experience of matter and space. As an
absolute vacuum is an impossibility below, so is it a like impossibility
above. But our molecules, the infinitesimals of the vacuum "below," are
replaced by the giant-atom of the Infinitude "above." When
demonstrated, the four-dimensional conception of space may lead to the
invention of new instruments to explore the extremely dense matter that
surrounds us as a ball of pitch might surround--say, a fly, but which,
in our extreme ignorance of all its properties save those we find it
exercising on our earth, we yet call the clear, the serene, and the
transparent atmosphere.
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