Afterword
Summary
In 1905, Einstein was supporting himself by working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office while completing his doctoral thesis, ‘A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions’, and preparing his paper on his special theory of relativity, ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’. Across the Atlantic, Charles Howard Hinton was working at his day job in the US Patent Office and revising his cube exercises into ‘A Language of Space’ for publication with his second edition of The Fourth Dimension. Hinton died in 1907 and, by the middle of the twentieth century, he had become a footnote in the history of science and science fiction.
Studies of relativity theory and its impact on the arts tend to focus on Henri Bergson's philosophical writings as an intermediary between the two cultures. Hinton's work runs in parallel with Bergson's in many ways, although there are important key differences. The translation of Bergson into English in the 1910s as well as the popularization of Einstein's work from 1919 onward no doubt contributed to the shift of attention away from Hinton's hyperspace philosophy. The fact that Hinton did not live long enough to incorporate Einstein's ideas into his own work, while Bergson did, was also a contributing factor.
William James's discovery of the writings of Henri Bergson and disavowal of the ‘logic’ of higher dimensionality in A Pluralistic Universe (1909) is indicative of this shift. Although in this text James frequently employed spatial metaphors such as Fechner's ‘mother-sea’ and described his belief in possibility of ‘higher consciousnesses’ in language that is very similar to Hinton's, he also stated:
I prefer to call reality if not irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution, – and by reality here I mean reality where things happen, all temporal reality without exception. I find myself no good warrant for even suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than that distributed and strung-along and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings swim in. That is the sort of reality given to us, and that is the sort with which logic is so incommensurable. […] I should not now be emancipated, not now subordinate logic with so very light a heart, […] if I had not been influenced by a comparatively young and very original french [sic] writer, Professor Henri Bergson.
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- Before EinsteinThe Fourth Dimension in Fin-de-Siècle Literature and Culture, pp. 195 - 198Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2017