Thus they had two modes of access to the king, one through their own selves where he had made them exist, one through the outer world. And in the outer world it was but a direction in which they could look. They could never behold the personality of the king, but only an infinite series of different kinds of matter, one supporting the other as it were and underlying it, but doing more also than this, for in proportion as they considered the kinds of matter that lay deeper they found that distant became near, absent, present, that time gave no longer such distinctions, but from the phenomenal side they seemed by a gradual diminution of the limitations of experience to arrive at an external presentation of that absolute which exists in the fulness of things, which they knew more immediately in themselves when they truly were.
In the next two or three of these papers certain questions connected with the subject of a space higher than our own will be treated. It is well, therefore, first to recede and to form definite conceptions about a world of plane space, about a world in which the beings can only move in two independent directions. Then, proceeding thence to our own world, we may gain the means of passing on to a higher world. And I should have wished to be able to refer the reader altogether to that ingenious work, “Flatland.” But on turning over its pages again, I find that the author has used his rare talent for a purpose foreign to the intent of our work. For evidently the physical conditions of life on the plane have not been his main object. He has used them as a setting wherein to place his satire and his lessons. But we wish, in the first place, to know the physical facts.
With this aim it is necessary to form a clear idea of what matter would be in a world of two dimensions, and the following illustration is a convenient one.
Place on the smooth surface of a table a half-crown piece, and suppose it to slide on the table perfectly freely. Imagine it to exercise an attractive force along the surface of the table in all directions round itself. By it and near it place a sixpence, and let the sixpence also slide freely on the table. It will, however, not be so free to move equally in all directions as the half-crown was, for it will be attracted by the half-crown. It will slip over the surface of the table under the influence of this supposed force, and will come into contact with the half-crown. Now if we suppose that both the half-crown and the sixpence are very thin, that they are both of them only the thickness of the ultimate particles of matter, then we shall have a representation of what material bodies will be in a plane world.