THE FOURTH DIMENSION. 



99 



"of its own condition. It will, in the time to come I know not 

 "when or where be proved, that the human soul, even in this life, 

 "exists in a state of uninterrupted connection with all the imma- 

 terial natures of the spiritual world ; that it alternately acts on 

 "them and receives impressions from them, of which, as a human 

 " soul, it is not, in the normal state of things, conscious. It would 

 " be a great thing, if some such systematic constitution of the spirit- 

 ual world, as we conceive it, could be deduced, not exclusively 

 " from our general notion of spiritual nature, which is altogether too 

 "hypothetical, but from some real and universally admitted ob- 

 "servations, or, for that matter, if it could even be shown to be 

 "probable." 



What Kant really asserts here is, first, the partly independent 

 and partly dependent existence of the soul, and of spiritual beings 

 generally, on matter, and, second, that spiritual beings have some 

 common connection with and mutually influence one another. Th'.s 

 contention, which is that of very many thinkers, does not, how- 

 ever, entail the consequence that the "transcendental subject of 

 Kant " must be four-dimensional, as Zollner asserts it does. Kant 

 never even hinted at the theory that the psychical features of the 

 world owe their connection with the material features to the fact 

 that they are four-dimensional and, therefore, include the three- 

 dimensional. Is it a necessary conclusion that if a thing exists and 

 is not three-dimensional, as is the case with the soul, it is there- 

 fore four-dimensional? Can it not in fact* be so constituted that it 

 is wholly meaningless to speak of dimensions at all in connection 

 with it ? 



Yet still more strangely than the words of Plato and Kant do 

 certain utterances of the mathematicians Gauss and Riemann speak 

 in favor of Zollner's hypothesis. S. v. Waltershausen relates of 

 Gauss in his Gruss zum Gedachtniss, (Leipsic, 1856), that Gauss 

 had often remarked that the three dimensions of space were only 

 a specific peculiarity of the human mind. We can think ourselves, 

 he said, into beings who are conscious of only two dimensions ; 

 similarly, perhaps, beings who are above and outside our world may 

 look down upon us ; and there were, he continued, in a jesting tone, 



