Chapter X (part 4)

This happens because the circle inevitably ends in the same point at which it began, and the "life" of the separate being, beginning with birth, must end in death, which is the return to the point of departure. But during its transit through our space, the circle puts forth from itself certain lines, which, uniting with others, yield new circles. In reality of course all this proceeds quite otherwise: nothing is born and nothing dies; it only so represents itself to us, because we see but the sections of things. In reality, the circle of life is only the section of something , and that something undoubtedly exists before birth, i.e., before the appearance of the circle in our space, and continues to exist after death, i.e., after the disappearance of the circle from the field of our vision. To our observation the phenomena of life are similar to the phenomena of motion as these appear to the two-dimensional being; and therefore it may be that this is "the motion in the fourth dimension." We have seen that the two-dimensional being is bound to regard the properties of the three-dimensionality of solids as motions, and the real motions of solids, going on in the higher space as the phenomena of life. In other words, that motion which remains a motion in the higher space appears to the lower being as a phenomenon of life, and that which disappears in the higher space, transforming itself into the property of an immobile solid, appears to the lower being as mechanical motion. The phenomena of "life" and the phenomena of "motion" are just as incommensurable for us as are the two kinds of motion in its world for the two-dimensional being; one of these motions being real and the other illusory. Hinton says of this incommensurability: "There is something in life not included in our conception of mechanical movement. Is this something a four-dimensional movement? "If we look at it from the broadest point of view there is something striking in the fact that where life comes in there arises an entirely p. 118 different set of phenomena from those of the inorganic world." 1 Upon this basis it is justifiable to assume that those phenomena which we call the phenomena of life are movements in higher space. Those phenomena which we call mechanical motion become in turn the phenomena of life in a space lower relatively to ours, and in one higher, simply the properties of immobile solids. This means that if we consider three kinds of existence—the two-dimensional, ours, and the higher dimensional—then it will appear that the "motion" which is observed by the two-dimensional being in two-dimensional space, is for us a property of immobile solids; "life" as it is apprehended in two-dimensional space, is "motion" as we observe it in our space. Moreover, motions in three-dimensional space, i.e., all our mechanical motions and the manifestations of physico-chemical forces—light, sound, heat, etc.,—are only our sensations of some to us incomprehensible properties of four-dimensional solids; and our "phenomena of life" are the motions of solids of higher space which appear to us as the birth, growth, and life of living beings. But if we presuppose a space not of four, but of five dimensions, then in it the "phenomena of life" would probably appear as the properties of immobile solids —genus, species, families, peoples, races, and so forth—and motions would seem, perhaps, only the phenomena of thought . _____ We know that the phenomena of motion or the manifestations of energy are involved with the expenditure of time, and we see how, with the gradual transcendence of the lower space by the higher, motion disappears, being converted into the properties of immobile solids; i.e., the expenditure of time disappears—and the necessity for time.