MATTER 269 



get out of his space through the squirt — tJirough and out 

 in the direction of matter — he would reach a new world, 

 wherein he would perceive what squirts were, and what 

 his matter really consisted in. Through the eye of the 

 needle, out through the matter of flatland, the flounder 

 would reach the heaven of our three-dimensioned space, 

 where we go up and down, as well as forward and back- 

 ward, and to right and left. But for the flounder this 

 " out through matter " would remain inconceivable, not to 

 say ridiculous ; it would be to penetrate behind the sur- 

 face of sense-impressions. 



Now this parable of the flounder is specially intended 

 for those minds which, strive as they will, cannot wholly 

 repress their metaphysical tendencies, which must project 



Fig. 20. 



their conceptions into realities beyond perception. The 

 danger of this metaphysical speculation lies in the frequency 

 with which it contradicts our perceptual experience when 

 it passes from the " beyond " of sense-impression to the 

 world of phenomena. Now a happy conception as to how 

 the prime-atom is to be constructed, fitting in with all 

 our perceptual experience (that is, enabling us to describe 

 it symbolically with great accuracy), might leave a loop- 

 hole for the metaphysical mind to pass to something 

 which does not symbolise the perceptual, and therefore 

 might dogmatically be assumed to belong to the super- 

 sensuous. Out from our space through the ether-squirt, 

 out through matter we in conception pass, like the flounder, 

 to another dimensioned space. This space has for a 

 number of years past formed the subject of elaborate in- 

 vestigations by some of our best mathematicians,^ and it 

 1 Riemann, Helmholtz, Beltrami, and Clifford. 



