Alfred T. Schofield's book: Another world, or the fourth dimension is an interesting book that draws conclusions from Edwin Abbott's Flatland and the Bible combined. For some people this my seem profane, however, it takes to read the book to see that his writings are not at all conceived without some solid grounds. If he is at some points wrong, then Abbot's ideas, or the Bible, are also concurrently wrong.
Another world ... was published in 1888 in London, the same year when Flammarion published The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology and where Flammarion's famous woodcut was said to be in included in this book.
The first part of Another World ... is an extensive review of Abbot's Flatland. Schofield wants the reader to have a somewhat solid foundation of the perception of the worlds of 'Pointland', 'Lineland', and 'Flatland'. The influence of Abbot in Another World is evident and he makes no intent to conceal it. In fact, Another World ... is clearly based of Flatland. The extensive use of paragraph citations is a manifestation of Flatland's influence upon him. However, the intention of Schofield is in no way to steal or plagiarize Abbot's ideas. In his own words in the Introduction he writes:
I would here take the opportunity of acknowledging my deep indebtedness to the anonymous author of a small book, called "Flatland," which I have used extensively throughout, and without which I am quite sure the public would never have been troubled with these remarks; my object being to carry on the line of argument there brought forward, to what seems to me its true and necessary conclusion.
He uses many of Flatland's sections to teach his readers about the space dimensions and to lay the grounds about the conclusions he is going to draw from passages of the Bible and from Christianity in general.
Briefly described, because Flatland describes it in full details, Pointland is the "universe" or "world" of no dimension at all; it is just a point with no extension in any direction. But Pointland is not the Void, Pointland is not an empty space. Venturing a little into some modern physics, it is difficult to resist the temptation of associating Pointland with the hypothetical micro black holes. These mental constructs are calculated to be about 2 × 10−8 kg, an extremely small point-object indeed, however, but for Abbott, every world is populated, no matter how many dimensions it has, even if it lack of dimensions at all, like in Pointland, or in the center of a micro black hole.
In a journey that remembers us the epic of Dante's 'Divine Comedy', in a dream, the Sphere guides A. Square to the unbelievable world of the space without dimensions: Pointland.
Look yonder, "said my Guide, "in Flatland thou hast lived; of Lineland thou hast received a vision; thou hast soared with me to the heights of Spaceland; now, in order to complete the range of thy experience, I conduct thee downward to the lowest depth of existence, even to the realm of Pointland, the Abyss of No dimensions.
There they found a living creature —nothing less than a Monarch— that has no dimension in any extension.
Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing.
This tiny being was immensely happy of himself for his "Infinite beatitude of existence!" Keeping talking about himself, in Third Person as the Sphere said because "have you not noticed before now, that babies and babyish people who cannot distinguish themselves from the world, speak of themselves in the Third Person?"
"It fills all Space," continued the little soliloquizing Creature, "and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being! "
After hearing this Monarch in an almost never finishing monologue, they decided to go back to their more comfortable Flatland. Oh Flatland, home sweet home!
"You see," said my Teacher, "how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understand them at all, he accepts them as his own--for he cannot conceive of any other except himself--and plumes himself upon the variety of 'Its Thought' as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction."
As mentioned above, Schofield uses all the passages from Flatland that can be useful for his readers to understand the concept of dimension with the idea of later delving into the fourth dimension concept and how the Bible and Christianity unconsciously uses it.
Schofield uses two approaches to the understanding of the fourth dimension:
(A) How lower dimensions are perceived by beings in higher dimensions, and (B) How higher dimensions are perceived by beings of lower dimensions.
He starts with the first choice as follows:
(A) Some of the relations of a being in one dimension, with the dimensions below him and the beings in it.
Then he continues speculating about how a being from any dimension will perceive other higher dimensions.
(B) The relations of a being in one dimension with that above him and its inhabitants.
Schofield sees the connection of our material world and the spiritual world of the Bible in the following way:
Speaking of communion, and turning to the Bible and to the lives of the saints and of all good men in ancient and modern days, and, on the other hand, to certain events in the lives of bad men, especially in connection with great crimes, no student of the subject can doubt that the expressions, "We see Jesus," "David sat before the Lord," "God spoke to Moses," "Satan tempted him," "Daniel cried unto the Lord," "I sought the Lord, and He heard me," and hundreds of similar utterances in biographies and from the lips of living men, represent the fact of communion and intercourse between the two worlds, just as faith, the evidence of things not seen, prayer, contemplation and abstraction represent the means.
In the next paragraph he says:
The testimony of the Bible alone (if believed) is of course overwhelming on the point. Angels come and go at will, God Himself is seen in Old Testament times in human form, and in New Testament times, when our Lord takes a spiritual body, He appears or disappears in this world of ours at will. A hand wrote on Belshazzar's wall. The form of the Son of God was seen in the fiery furnace. Since then appearances have been seen and voices heard that cannot be explained by anything in three dimensions.
The painting shown here depicts the incident of the feast by Belshazzar (Balthazar) where a hand appears and writes on a wall was done by Rembrandt (1606-1669) based on the narrative in the Old Testament Book of Daniel (5: 1-6):
Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. 6 His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his knees knocked together and his legs gave way.
We see in the painting that a hand appears out of nowhere and writes some words on the wall. Recall that the statement 5 above of the behavior of a being from a higher dimension entering a lower dimension says "5. When he enters the world below, he can never be wholly seen, and that part of him that is seen is always in the form of the world below him which he enters." This is exactly what happens in this painting: a hand from an unknown dimension (the heaven, may say the believers) enters into a lower dimension and writes on a wall.
In Flatland a similar thing happened to A. Square —the main character of Flatland , the world— when a Sphere, the main character from our three-dimension space, entered in his flat world.
The verses about the ascension of Enoch are found in Hebrews 11:5
By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death; he could not be found, because God had taken him away.
Schofield also mentions other passages from the Bible that can be explained easily as moving to and fro from some dimensions to another. "We have also the account of Elijah and Enoch and Christ suddenly leaving this world for the higher one, while yet alive."
See the painting by Giuseppe Angeli (1712-1798) that illustrates the passing of a human being from one dimension to another while still alive. This painting is titled: Elijah Taken Up in a Chariot of Fire
In another painting —this time by Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734)— we see the ascension of Enoch, similar to the ascension of Elijah. This painting is also titled: Enoch.
Is there a conclusion, or a lesson, that can be derived from Schofield's book? Yes, for those interested in theology and the Bible, both books: Flatland and Another world, or the fourth dimension should be mandatory readings.
E. Pérez
10/10
Also in this Website
About Camille Flammarion:
The strange extraterrestrial worlds of Camille Flammarion
About the fourth dimension:
Can there be different fourth dimensions?
The coordinates of the fourth dimension
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