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: