The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky Read Online Free PDF

has three dimensions - length, breadth and height. Why should it not relax its standards, and permit a world with four dimensions - length, breadth, height, and another dimension at right angles to these?
    Why make such a supposition in the first place? It seems to have come about as a result of some of the puzzles of the new 'science' of psychical research, which began to come into being in the 1860s. The 'occult revival' began in 1848, with loud banging and rapping noises in the house of a New York farmer named Fox. These later turned into classic 'poltergeist' phenomena, with objects flying through the air. Soon hundreds of 'mediums' were causing even more spectacular effects - trumpets played themselves as they floated in space, tables rose from the ground, flowers materialized out of the air, and ghostly hands stroked the faces of the 'sitters' at seances. Moreover, poltergeists seemed to have the ability to cause solid objects to fly through walls. The solution, many 'Spiritualists' came to believe, was a fourth dimension. If spirits inhabited a universe with an extra dimension, then a poltergeist would not actually be throwing an object through a wall, but 'over' it, into the fourth dimension - just as a giant could step over a wall that would be an insurmountable obstacle to a beetle.
    A Professor Johann Carl Friederich Zollner, of the University of Leipzig, seems to have originated this theory that spirits inhabit a four-dimensional world, and he decided to test it by asking a 'medium' if he could get the spirits to tie a knot in a piece of string whose two ends had been joined together in a circle (and also sealed with sealing wax). The experiment took place in 1877, with an American medium called Henry Slade, and Slade - or the spirits - tied the knot in the string at his first attempt. One of the witnesses to the experiment was Zollner's fellow professor Gustav Fechner, who had written an essay on 'Why Space Has Four Dimensions' as early as 1846. Unfortunately, Slade had been tried and convicted of cheating in London in the previous year - Professor Ray Lankester had snatched a slate before the 'spirits' had time to write on it, and found that it was already written on. Slade insisted that he had heard the squeak of the slate pencil moments before Lankester snatched the slate.
    Alas, in later life, Slade was often caught cheating, which would seem to dispose of him as a witness for the fourth dimension. But this assumption may be too hasty. The Society for Psychical Research, formed in 1882, reached the conclusion that although mediums do cheat, the evidence for the reality of spiritualistic phenomena - including poltergeists - is overwhelming. Their experience also confirmed that many 'genuine' mediums sometimes resorted to cheating. Slade was later caught cheating before the Seybert Committee in Philadelphia, and he acknowledged to them that Zollner had watched him closely only for the first three or four sittings, then allowed him to do as he liked. But since the knotted string was produced at the first sitting, it seems possible that it was genuine.
    To Ouspensky, it seemed obvious that the idea of the fourth dimension is one of the most important that human beings can contemplate. When we are tired, our minds simply accept the material world around us without question; everything is merely 'itself'. But as soon as we experience the sense of happiness and excitement that often comes on spring mornings, or setting out on holiday, the world is seen to be full of infinite possibilities, and nothing is merely 'itself': everything seems to stand for something that is more than itself, just as the words on this page stand for something more than themselves. Hinton himself grasped this notion in an essay called 'Many Dimensions', where he speaks of errand boys reading 'penny dreadfuls', and how they could be spending their time more fruitfully 'communing with space' (which for Hinton meant trying to think