Already I was considered heterodox if not
treasonable, and I was keenly alive to the danger of my position;
nevertheless I could not at times refrain from bursting out into
suspicious or half-seditious utterances, even among the highest
Polygonal or Circular society. When, for example, the question arose
about the treatment of those lunatics who said that they had received
the power of seeing the insides of things, I would quote the saying
of an ancient Circle, who declared that prophets and inspired people
are always considered by the majority to be mad; and I could not help
occasionally dropping such expressions as "the eye that discerns
the interiors of things," and "the all-seeing land"; once or twice
I even let fall the forbidden terms "the Third and Fourth Dimensions."
At last, to complete a series of minor indiscretions, at a meeting of
our Local Speculative Society held at the palace of the Prefect himself,
--some extremely silly person having read an elaborate paper exhibiting
the precise reasons why Providence has limited the number of Dimensions
to Two, and why the attribute of omnividence is assigned to the Supreme
alone--I so far forgot myself as to give an exact account of the whole
of my voyage with the Sphere into Space, and to the Assembly Hall
in our Metropolis, and then to Space again, and of my return home,
and of everything that I had seen and heard in fact or vision.
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