122 THE SEVEN FOLLIES OF SCIENCE 



founding their adversaries by bringing forward a striking 

 illustration of Hamlet's famous dictum " 



*' There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 

 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 



A very fair statement of this view is thus given by 

 Edward Carpenter : l 



" There is another idea which modern science has been 

 familiarizing us with, and which is bringing us towards 

 the same conception that, namely, of the fourth dimen- 

 sion. The supposition that the actual world has four 

 space-dimensions instead of three makes many things 

 conceivable which otherwise would be incredible. It makes 

 it conceivable that apparently separate objects, e. g., dis- 

 tinct people, are really physically united; that things ap- 

 parently sundered by enormous distances of space are 

 really quite together; that a person or other object might 

 pass in and out of a closed room without disturbance of 

 walls, doors or windows, etc., and if this fourth dimension 

 were to become a factor of our consciousness it is obvious 

 that we should have means of knowledge which, to the 

 ordinary sense, would appear simply miraculous. There is 

 much, apparently, to suggest that the consciousness at- 

 tained to by the Indian gnanis in their degree, and by 

 hypnotic subjects in theirs, is of this fourth dimensional 

 order. 



" As a solid is related to its own surface, so, it would 

 appear, is the cosmic consciousness related to the ordinary 

 consciousness. The phases of the personal consciousness 

 are but different facets of the other consciousness; and 

 experiences which seem remote from each other in the in- 

 dividual are perhaps all equally near in the universal. 

 Space itself, as we know it, may be practically annihilated 

 in the consciousness of a larger space, of which it is but the 

 superficies; and a person living in London may not un- 

 likely find that he has a back door opening quite simply 

 and unceremoniously out in Bombay." 



On the other hand, the mathematicians, looking at it as 

 a purely speculative idea, have endeavored to arrive at 



1 " From Adam's Peak to Elephanta " page 160. 



