270 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



possesses this great advantage : that when we pass from 

 the conclusions drawn for this higher space to the space 

 of our perceptual experience, then we are not involved in 

 the contradictions which abound in the transition from 

 the older metaphysics to our physical experience. Here 

 in this new playroom, entered, perhaps, by the doorway of 

 matter, metaphysician and theologian can for the present 

 safely spin beyond the sensible the cobwebs, which have 

 been swept away by the scientific broom whenever they 

 encumbered the habitable apartments of knowledge. 

 The necessary mathematical equipment required for 

 genuine research in the field of higher-dimensioned space 

 will at any rate act as a safeguard against over light- 

 hearted expeditions " beyond the sensible " ! Should a 

 time ever come, which may, perhaps, be doubted, when a 

 happy conception as to the structure of the prime-atom is 

 discovered to be a percepttial fact, then if such a conception 

 involves the existence of four-dimensioned space,^ our 

 friends will have done yeoman service in preparing a way 

 for a scientific theory of the supersensuous — out through 

 the doorway of matter ! 



8 12. — TJie Difficulties of a Perceptual Ether 



But I have romanced enough for the sake of the meta- 

 physically-minded. Returning to the solid ground of fact, 

 we have to remember that no hypothesis as to the structure 

 of the prime-atom from ether in motion is at present 

 scientifically accepted ; no model dynamical system for 

 the atom has as yet been shown to have such a wide- 

 reaching power of describing our perceptual experience 

 that it has passed from the field of imagination and 



1 The ether-squirt is not the only atomic theory which suggests a space 

 beyond our own. Clifford imagined matter to be a wrinkle in our space, 

 which suggests the idea of another space to bend it in. This notion of 

 Clifford's may, perhaps, be brought home to our reader by imagining the 

 flounder rigidly flat and a crumple or wrinkle in his plane of motion. The 

 wrinkle would, like matter, be impenetrable to the fish ; he could not Jit it ; 

 either the wrinkle or he would have to get out of the way. This non-fitting 

 of two kinds of space has not hitherto, however, been developed as a mode 

 of describing any of our fundamental physical experiences. 



