than the thought of being on a spinning ball, kicked into space without any means of communication with any other inhabitants of the universe.

But what does the world of many dimensions represent in itself—what are these solids of many dimensions the lines and boundaries of which we perceive as motion?

A great power of imagination is necessary to transcend the limits of our perceptions and to visualize mentally the world in other categories even for a moment.

Let us imagine some object, say a book, outside of time and space. What will this last mean? Were we to take the book out of time and space it would mean that all books which have existed, exist now, and will exist, exist together, i. e., occupy one and the same place and exist simultaneously, forming as it were one book which includes within itself the properties, characteristics and peculiarities of all books possible in the world. When we say simply, a book, we have in mind something possessing the common characteristic of all books—this is a concept. But that book about which we are talking now, possesses not only these common characteristics but the individual characteristics of all separate books.

Let

Let us take other things—a table, a house, a tree, a man. us imagine them out of time and space. The mind will have to open its doors to objects each possessing such an enormous, such an infinite number of signs and characteristics that to comprehend them by means of the reason is absolutely impossible. And if one wants to comprehend them by his reason he will certainly be forced to dismember these objects somehow, to take them at first in some one sense, from one side, in one section of their being. What is "man" out of space and time? He is all humanity, man as the "species"—Homo Sapiens, but at the same time possessing the characteristics, peculiarities and individual earmarks of all separate men. This is you, and I, and Julius Caesar and the conspirators who killed him, and the newsboy I pass every day—all kings, all slaves, all saints, all sinners—all taken together, fused into one indivisible being of a man, like a great living tree in which are bark, wood, and dry twigs; green leaves,

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flowers and fruit. Is it possible to conceive of and understand such a being by our reason?

The idea of such a "great being" inspired the artist or artists who created the Sphinx.

But what is motion? Why do we feel it if it does not exist? About this last, Mabel Collins, a theosophical writer of the first period of modern theosophy, writes very beautifully in her poetical Story of the Year.

The entire true meaning of the earthly life consists only in the mutual contact between personalities and in the efforts of growth. Those things which are called events and circumstances and which are regarded as the real contents of life are in reality only the conditions which make these contacts and this growth possible.

In these words there sounds already quite a new understanding of the real. And truly the illusion of motion cannot arise out of nothing. When we are travelling by train, and the trees are running, overtaking one another, we know that this motion is an illusory one, that the trees are immobile, and that the illusion of their motion is created by our own.

As in these particular cases, so also in general as regards all motion in the material world, the foundation of which the "positivists" consider to be motion in the finest particles of matter, we, recognizing this motion as an illusory one, will ask: Is not an illusion of this motion created by some motion inside our consciousness?

So it will be.

And having established this, we shall endeavor to define what kind of motion is going on inside our consciousness, i. e., what is moving relatively to what?

H. P. Blavatsky, in her first book, Isis Unveiled, touched upon the same question concerning the relation of life to time and motion. She writes:

As our planet revolves every year around the sun and at the same time turns once in every twenty-four hours upon its own axis, thus travers

ing minor cycles within a larger one, so is the work of the smaller cyclic periods accomplished and recommenced.

The revolution of the physical world, according to the ancient doctrine, is attended by a like revolution in the world of intellect—the spiritual evolution of the world proceeding in cycles, like the physical one.

Thus we see in history a regular alternation of ebb and flow in the tide of human progress. The great kingdoms and empires of the world, after reaching the culmination of their greatness, descend again in accordance with the same law by which they ascended; till, having reached the lowest point, humanity reasserts itself and mounts up once more, the height of its attainment being, by this law of ascending progression by cycles, somewhat higher than the point from which it had before descended.

The division of the history of mankind into Golden, Silver, Copper and Iron Ages, is not a fiction. We see the same thing in the literature of peoples. An age of great inspiration and unconscious productiveness is invariably followed by an age of criticism and consciousness. The one affords material for the analyzing and critical intellect of the other.

Thus all those great characters who tower like giants in the history of mankind, like Buddha-Siddârtha, and Jesus, in the realm of spiritual, and Alexander the Macedonian and Napoleon the Great, in the realm of physical conquests, were but reflexed images of human types which had existed ten thousand years before, in the preceeding decimillennium, reproduced by the mysterious powers controlling the destinies of our world. There is no prominent character in all the annals of sacred or profane history whose prototype we cannot find in the half-fictitious and half-real traditions of bygone religions and mythologies. As the star, glimmering at an immeasurable distance above our heads, in the boundless immensity of the sky, reflects itself in the smooth waters of a lake, so does the imagery of men of the antediluvian ages reflect itself in the periods we can embrace in an historical retrospect.

As above, so below. That which has been will return again. As in heaven, so on earth.

Anything that can be said about the understanding of temporal relations is inevitably extremely vague. This is because our language is absolutely inadequate to the spatial expression of temporal relations. We lack the necessary words for it, we have no verbal forms, strictly speaking, for the expression of these relations whch are new to us, and some other quite new forms— not verbal—are indispensable. The language for the transmission of the new temporal relations must be a language without verbs. New parts of speech are necessary, an infinite number of new words. At present, in our human language we can speak about "time" by hints only. Its true essence is inexpressible for us.

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We should never forget about this inexpressibility. This is the sign of the truth, the sign of reality. That which can be expressed, cannot be true.

All systems dealing with the relation of the human soul to time all ideas of post-mortem existence, the theory of reincarnation, that of the transmigration of souls, of karma—are symbols, trying to transmit relations which cannot be expressed directly because of the poverty and the weakness of our language. They should not be understood literally any more than it is possible to understand the symbols and allegories of art literally. It is necessary to search for their hidden meanings, that which cannot be expressed in words.

The literal understanding of these symbolical forms in certain lines of contemporary literature, and the union with them of ideas of "evolution" and "morals" taken in the most narrow, dualistic meaning, completely disfigures the inner content of these forms, and deprives them of their value and meaning.

CHAPTER XI

Science and the problem of the fourth dimension. The address of Prof. N. A. Oumoff before the Mendeleevskian Convention in 1911— "The Characteristic Traits and Problems of Contemporary Scientific Thought." The new physics. The electro-magnetic theory. The principle of relativity. The works of Einstein and Minkowsky. Simultaneous existence of the past and the future. The Eternal Now. Van Manen's book about occult experiences. The drawing of a four-dimensional figure.

S

PEAKING generally with regard to the problems propounded in the foregoing chapters those of time, space, and the higher dimensions—it is impossible not to dwell once more upon the relation of science to these problems. To many persons the relation of "exact science" to these questions which undoubtedly constitute the most important problem now engaging human thought appears highly enigmatical.

If it is important why does not science deal with it? And why, on the contrary, does science repeat the old, contradictory affirmations, pretending not to know or not to notice an entire series of theories and hypotheses advanced?

Science should be the investigation of the unknown. Why, therefore, is it not anxious to investigate this unknown, which has been in process of revelation for a long time—which soon will cease to be the unknown?

It is possible to answer this question only by acknowledging that unfortunately official, academic science is doing but a small part of what it should be doing in regard to the investigation of the new and unknown. For the most part, it is only teaching that which has already become the commonplace of the independent thinker; or still worse, has already become antiquated and rejected as valueless.

So it is the more pleasant to remark that even in science may sometimes be discerned an aspiration toward the search of new horizons of thought; or, to put it differently, not always and not in