Chapter VI (part 9)

Until the plane being shall imagine all our universe as existing in time, i.e., until he refers to time everything lying on both sides of his plane, he will never understand anything. In order to begin to understand "the third dimension" the inhabitant of the plane must conceive of his time concepts spatially , that is, translate his time into space. To achieve even the spark of a true understanding of our world he will have to reconstruct completely all his ideas— to revaluate all values , to revise all concepts, to dissever the uniting concepts, to unite those which are dissevered; and, what is most important, to create an infinite number of new ones. If we put down the five fingers of one hand on the plane of the two-dimensional being they will be for him five separate phenomena . Let us try to imagine what an enormous mental evolution he would have to undergo in order to understand that these five separate phenomena on his plane are the finger-tips of the hand of a large, active and intelligent being—man. To make out, step by step, how the plane being would attain to an understanding of our world, lying in the region of the to him mysterious third dimension —i.e., partly in the past, partly in the future—would be interesting in the highest degree. First of all, in order to understand the world of three dimensions, he must cease to be two-dimensional—he must become three-dimensional himself, or in other words he must feel an interest in the life of three-dimensional space. After having felt the interest of this life, he will by so doing transcend his plane, and will never be in a position thereafter to return to it. Entering more and more within the circle of ideas and concepts which were entirely incomprehensible to him before, he will have already become, not two-dimensional, but three-dimensional. But all along the plane being will have been essentially three-dimensional, that is, he will have had the third dimension, without his being conscious of it himself. To become three-dimensional he must be three-dimensional. Then as the end of ends he can address himself to the self-liberation from the illusion of the two-dimensionality of himself and the world, and to the apprehension of the three-dimensional world. Footnotes 70:1 C. H. Hinton, "The Fourth Dimension," pp. 23, 24 and 25.