The fourth dimension

APPENDIX IL 259

deliverances of which our consciousness takes account are probably identical for eye and ear, sight and touch.

If for a moment I take the whole earth together and regard it asa sentient being, I find that the problem of its apprehension is a very complex one, and involves a long series of personal and physical events. Similarly the problem of our apprehension is a very complex one. I only use this illustration to exhibit my meaning. It has this especial merit, that, as the process of conscious apprehension takes place in our case in the minute, so, with regard to this earth being, the corresponding process takes place in what is relatively to it very minute.

Now, Plato’s view of a soul leads us to the hypothesis that that which we designate as an act of apprehension may be a very complex event, both physically and personally. He does not seek to explain what an intuition is; he makes it a basis from whence he sets out on a voyage of discovery. Knowledge means knowledge; he puts conscious being to account for conscious being. He makes an hypothesis of the kind that is so fertile in physical science—an hypothesis making no claim to finality, which marks out a vista of possible determination behind determination, like the hypothesis of space itself, the type of serviceable hypotheses.

And, above all, Plato’s hypothesis is conducive to experiment. He gives the perspective in which real objects can be determined; and, in our present enquiry, we are making the simplest of all possible experiments—we are enquiring what it is natural to the soul tothink of matter as extended.

Aristotle says we always use a “ phantasm ” in thinking, a phantasm of our corporeal senses a visualisation or a tactualisation. But we can so modify that visualisation or tactualisation that it represents something not known by the senses. Do we by that representation wake up an