angles of a triangle aretogether _greater_ than two right angles, if drawn upon immensecurvatures--the breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky--allthese I hurried through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon theverge of my--my new world, my Higher Space possibilities--in a word, mydisease!
"How I got there," he resumed after a brief pause, during which heappeared to be listening intently for an approaching sound, "is morethan I can put intelligibly into words. I can only hope to leave yourmind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what I say.
"Here, however, came a change. At this point I was no longer absorbingthe fruits of studies I had made before; it was the beginning of newefforts to learn for the first time, and I had to go slowly andlaboriously through terrible work. Here I sought for the theories andspeculations of others. But books were few and far between, and with theexception of one man--a 'dreamer,' the world called him--whose audacityand piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond description, Ifound no one to guide or help.
"You, of course, Dr. Silence, understand something of what I am drivingat with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet guess whatdepths of pain my new knowledge brought me to, nor why an acquaintancewith a new development of space should prove a source of misery andterror."
Mr. Racine Mudge, remembering that the chair would not move, did thenext best thing he could in his desire to draw nearer to the attentiveman facing him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the cushions,crossing his legs and gesticulating with both hands as though he sawinto this region of new space he was attempting to describe, and mightany moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the chair anddisappear form view. John Silence, separated from him by three paces,sat with his eyes fixed upon the thin white face opposite, notingevery word and every gesture with deep attention.
"This room we now sit in, Dr. Silence, has one side open to space--toHigher Space. A closed box only _seems_ closed. There is a way in andout of a soap bubble without breaking the skin."
"You tell me no new thing," the doctor interposed gently.
"Hence, if Higher Space exists and our world borders upon it and liespartially in it, it follows necessarily that we see only portions of allobjects. We never see their true and complete shape. We see their threemeasurements, but not their fourth. The new direction is concealed fromus, and when I hold this book and move my hand all round it I have notreally made a complete circuit. We only perceive those portions of anyobject which exist in our three dimensions; the rest escapes us. But,once we learn to see in Higher Space, objects will appear as theyactually are. Only they will thus be hardly recognisable!
"Now, you may begin to grasp something of what I am coming to."
"I am beginning to understand something of what you must have suffered,"observed the doctor soothingly, "for I have made similar experimentsmyself, and only stopped just in time--"
"You are the one man in all the world who can hear and understand, _and_sympathise," exclaimed Mr. Mudge, grasping his hand and holding ittightly while he spoke. The nailed chair prevented further excitability.
"Well," he resumed, after a moment's pause, "I procured the implementsand the coloured blocks for practical experiment, and I followed theinstructions carefully till I had arrived at a working conception offour-dimensional space. The tessaract, the figure whose boundaries arecubes, I knew by heart. That is to say, I knew it and saw it mentally,for my eye, of course, could never take in a new measurement, or myhands and feet handle it.
"So, at least, I thought," he added, making a wry face. "I had reachedthe stage, you see, when I could imagine in a new dimension. I was ableto conceive the shape of that new figure which is intrinsicallydifferent to all we know--the shape of the tessaract. I could perceivein four dimensions. When, therefore, I looked at a cube I could see allits sides at once. Its top was not foreshortened, nor its farther sideand base invisible. I saw the whole thing out flat, so to speak. Andthis tessaract was bounded by cubes! Moreover, I also saw itscontent--its insides."
"You were not yourself able to enter this new world," interrupted Dr.Silence.
"Not then. I was only able to conceive intuitively what it was like andhow exactly it must look. Later, when I slipped in there and saw objectsin their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor threemeasurements, I very nearly lost my life. For, you see, space does notstop at a single new dimension, a fourth. It extends in all possible newones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of newdimensions. In other words, there is no space at all, but only aspiritual condition. But, meanwhile, I had come to grasp the strangefact that the objects in our normal world appear to us only partially."
Mr. Mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously on thevery edge of the chair. "From this starting point," he resumed, "I beganmy studies and experiments, and continued them for years. I had money,and I was without friends. I lived in solitude and experimented. Myintellect, of course, had little part in the work, for intellectually itwas all unthinkable. Never was the limitation of mere reason moreplainly demonstrated. It was mystically, intuitively, spiritually that Ibegan to advance. And what I learnt, and knew, and did is all impossibleto put into language, since it all describes experiences transcendingthe experiences of men. It is only some of the results--what you wouldcall the symptoms of my disease--that I can give you, and even thesemust often appear absurd contradictions and impossible paradoxes.
"I can only tell you, Dr. Silence"--his manner became exceedinglyimpressive--"that I reached sometimes a point of view whence all thegreat puzzle of the world became plain to me, and I understood what theycall in the Yoga books 'The Great Heresy of Separateness'; why all greatteachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour ashimself; how men are all really one; and why the utter loss of self isnecessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the soul."
He paused a moment and drew breath.
"Your speculations have been my own long ago," the doctor said quietly."I fully realise the force of your words. Men are doubtless not separateat all--in the sense they imagine--"
"All this about the very much Higher Space I only dimly, very dimly,conceived, of course," the other went on, raising his voice again byjerks; "but what did happen to me was the humbler accident of--thesimpler disaster--oh, dear, how shall I put it--?"
He stammered and showed visible signs of distress.
"It was simply this," he resumed with a sudden rush of words, "that,accidentally, as the result of my years of experiment, I one day slippedbodily into the next world, the world of four dimensions, yet withoutknowing precisely how I got there, or how I could get back again. Idiscovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body was but anexpression--a projection--of my higher four-dimensional body!
"Now you understand what I meant much earlier in our talk when I spokeof chance. I cannot control my entrance or exit. Certain people, certainhuman atmospheres, certain wandering forces, thoughts, desires even--theradiations of certain combinations of colour, and above all, thevibrations of certain kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into astate of what I can only describe as an intense and terrific innervibration--and behold I am off! Off in the direction at right angles toall our known directions! Off in the direction the cube takes when itbegins to trace the outlines of the new figure! Off into my breathlessand semi-divine Higher Space! Off, _inside myself_, into the world offour dimensions!"
He gasped and dropped back into the depths of the immovable chair.
"And there," he whispered, his voice issuing from among the cushions,"there I have to stay until these vibrations subside, or until they dosomething which I cannot find words to describe properly or intelligiblyto you--and then, behold, I am back again. First, that is, I disappear.Then I reappear."
"Just so," exclaimed Dr. Silence, "and that is why a few--"
"Why a few moments ago," interrupted Mr. Mudge, taking the words out ofhis mouth, "you found me gone, and then saw me return. The music of t
hatwretched German band sent me off. Your intense thinking about me broughtme back--when the band had stopped its Wagner. I saw you approach thepeep-hole and I saw Barker's intention of doing so later. For me nointeriors are hidden. I see inside. When in that state the content ofyour mind, as of your body, is open to me as the day. Oh, dear, oh,dear, oh, dear!"
Mr. Mudge stopped and again mopped his brow. A light trembling ran overthe surface of his small body like wind over grass. He still heldtightly to the arms of the chair.
"At first," he presently resumed, "my new experiences were so vividlyinteresting that I felt no alarm. There was no room for it. The alarmcame a little later."
"Then you actually penetrated far enough into that state
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