Looking now in thought not at the body of man, but within it, we apprehend an ordered universe immensely vast in proportion to that physical ultimate we name the electron, as is the firmament immensely vast in proportion to a single star. It has been suggested that in the infinitely minute of organic bodies there is a power of movement in a fourth dimension. If so, such four-dimensional movement may be the proximate cause of the phenomenon of growth—of those chemical changes and renewals whereby an organism is enabled to expand in three-dimensional space, just as by a three-dimensional power of movement (the act of walking) man is able to traverse his two-dimensional space—the surface of the earth.
AND BEYOND
Proceed still further. Behind such organic change—assumed to be four-dimensional—there is the determination of some will-to-live, which manifests itself to consciousness as thought and as desire. Into these the idea of space does not enter: we think of them as in time. But if there are developments of other dimensions of space, thought and emotion may themselves be discovered to have space relations; that is, they may find expression in the forms of higher spaces. Thus is opened up one of those rich vistas in which the subject of the fourth dimension abounds, but into which we can only glance in passing. If there are such higher-dimensional thought-forms, our normal consciousness, limited to a world of three dimensions, can apprehend only their three-dimensional aspects, and these not simultaneously, but successively—that is, in time. According to this view, any unified series of actions—for example, the life of an individual, or of a group—would represent the straining, so to speak, of a thought-form through our time, as the bodies subject to these actions would represent its straining through our space.