In a still more obscure passage he now desires to disavow
the Circular or aristocratic tendencies with which some critics
have naturally credited him. While doing justice to the intellectual
power with which a few Circles have for many generations maintained
their supremacy over immense multitudes of their countrymen, he believes
that the facts of Flatland, speaking for themselves without comment
on his part, declare that Revolutions cannot always be suppressed
by slaughter, and that Nature, in sentencing the Circles to infecundity,
has condemned them to ultimate failure--"and herein," he says,
"I see a fulfilment of the great Law of all worlds, that while the wisdom
of Man thinks it is working one thing, the wisdom of Nature constrains
it to work another, and quite a different and far better thing."
For the rest, he begs his readers not to suppose that every minute detail
in the daily life of Flatland must needs correspond to some other detail
in Spaceland; and yet he hopes that, taken as a whole, his work may prove
suggestive as well as amusing, to those Spacelanders of moderate and modest
minds who--speaking of that which is of the highest importance, but lies
beyond experience--decline to say on the one hand, "This can never be,"
and on the other hand, "It must needs be precisely thus,
and we know all about it.
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