Produced by PG Distributed Proofreaders
by
Claude Bragdon
[Illustration]
New York
"Perception has a destiny." Emerson.
There are two notable emancipations of the mind from the tyranny ofmere appearances that have received scant attention save frommathematicians and theoretical physicists.
In 1823 Bolyai declared with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom ofparallels, "I will draw two lines through a given point, both ofwhich will be parallel to a given line." The drawing of these linesled to the concept of the curvature of space, and this to the ideaof higher space.
The recently developed Theory of Relativity has compelled therevision of the time concept as used in classical physics. Oneresult of this has been to introduce the notion of curved time.
These two ideas, of curved time and higher space, by their verynature are bound to profoundly modify human thought. They loosen thebonds within which advancing knowledge has increasingly labored,they lighten the dark abysses of consciousness, they reconcile thediscoveries of Western workers with the inspirations of Easterndreamers; but best of all, they open vistas, they offer "glimpsesthat may make us less forlorn."
The Undiscovered Country—Miracles—The Failure of Common Sense—The
Function of Science—Mathematics—Intuition—Our Sense of Space—The
Subjectivity of Space—The Need of an Enlarged Space-Concept.
Learning to Think in Terms of Spaces—From the Cosmos to the
Corpuscle—And Beyond—Evolution as Space-Conquest—Dimensional
Sequences—Man the Geometer—Higher, and Highest, Space.
Looking for the Greater in the Less—Symmetry—Other Allied
Phenomena—Isomerism—The Orbital Motion of Spheres: Cell-Subdivision—
The Electric Current—The Greater Universe—A Hint from Astronomy—
Gravitation—The Ether of Space.
Zöllner—Apparitions—Possession—Clairvoyance in Space—Clairvoyancein Time—Pisgah Sights of Life's Pageant.
Time from the Standpoint of Experiment and of Conscious Experience—Relativity—The Spoon-Man—The Orbital Movement of Time—Materialitythe Mirror of Consciousness—Periodicity.
Sleep—Dreams—Time in Dreams—The Eastern Teaching in regard to Sleepand Dreams—Space in Dreams—The Phenomenon of Pause.
The Field of Psychic Research—Modifying the Past—Karma and
Reincarnation—Colonel De Rochas' Experiments.
Oriental Physics and Metaphysics—The Self-Recovered Memory of past
Births—Release.
Hermes Trismegistus—The Page and the Press—The Ship and its
Captain—Direct Vision—Plato's Shadow-Watchers—Swedenborg—Man,
the Space-Eater—The Within and Without—Intuition and Reason—The
Coil of Life.
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