The fourth dimension

20 THE FOURTH DIMENSION

surely be the best way of grouping the phenomena and giving a practical account of them. And another difficulty is this, that no amount of mechanical adaptation would give that element of consciousness which we possess, and which is shared in to a modified degree by the animal world.

In those complex structures which men build up and direct, such as a ship or arailway train (and which, if seen by an observer of such a size that the men guiding them were invisible, would seem to present some of the phenomena of life) the appearance of animation is not due to any diffusion of life in the material parts of the structure, but to the presence of a living being.

The old hypothesis of a soul, a living organism within the visible one, appears to me much more rational than the attempt to explain life as a form of motion. And when we consider the region of extreme minuteness characterised by four-dimensional motion the difficulty of conceiving such an organism alongside the bodily one disappears. Lord Kelvin supposes that_matter_is formed from the .ether. We may very well suppose ‘that the living organisms directing the material ones are co-ordinate with them, not composed of matter, but consisting of etherial bodies, and as such capable of motion through the ether, and able to originate material living bodies throughout the mineral.

| Hypotheses such as these find no immediate ground for | proof or disproof in the physical world. Let us, therefore, turn to a different field, and, assuming that the human soul is a four-dimensional being, capable in itself of four dimensional movements, but in its experiences through the senses limited to three dimensions, ask if the history of thought, of these productivities which characterise man, correspond to our assumption. Let us pass in review those steps by which man, presumably a four-dimensional