Before Einstein by Elizabeth L. Throesch

Author:Elizabeth L. Throesch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

Part II

READING THROUGH THE FOURTH DIMENSION

Chapter Four

FOUR-DIMENSIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS: THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN WILLIAM JAMES AND CHARLES HOWARD HINTON

In my analysis of the second series of Scientific Romances we saw how Hinton began to explore the significance of four-dimensional consciousness for the individual subject. In particular, the narrator in An Unfinished Communication experiences four-dimensional consciousness as something that is continually developing and changing over time. Although it was latent in the first series of Scientific Romances, in the second series and the years that followed, the model Hinton was developing positions consciousness as a continual process of realization of higher and higher dimensions of being. He made this view explicit in a letter to William James in 1897:

I’m sure I much agree with you about the variegated nature of existence. In fact all attempts to run a principle thro’ things seem to me to be like plastering a piece over the whole. Unification is a means. Because it is useful in science it gets to be assumed to be an end in itself[.]‌ A more and more complex whole ever revealing itself in unusual forms – that seems to me the end of philosophers, with theories and principles, the arid analysis, merely to be tolerated because they enable us to carry the mass of details necessary to be grasped before we can apprehend the higher reality[,] the higher personality[,] the actual being.1

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