Roland Barthes noted the transgressive potential of analogy, writing that ‘its constitutive movement is that of cutting across’. The relational nature of analogous reasoning is also the essential feature that identifies the Scientific Romances: holding it together as a larger text is the concept of the fourth dimension itself. Hyperspace philosophy functions as a site where two different impulses – the ‘transcendental materialism’ described earlier – are linked. As a ‘Text’ (in Barthes's sense of the word), Hinton's fourth dimension disrupts the separation between objectivity and subjectivity, placing these two perceptual modes in tension with each other. Hinton's conception of the fourth dimension of space is intrinsically idealist; however, in his ‘scientific’ arguments he supported his theory along materialist lines. Nowhere is this contradiction more observable than in the final text of the first series, ‘Casting Out the Self’, where he attempted to find an empirical means of approaching the fourth dimension through introspection. The only way such a conflicted project can survive its own construction is through its functioning as a Text with a significant amount of ‘play’, again in Barthes's sense of the term:

In this chapter I examine the ways the overall structure of the Scientific Romances requires the reader to work with Hinton in the construction of the fourth dimension. Here I focus on how Hinton explicitly calls upon the reader for ‘practical collaboration’ in playing his texts as if they are a game, and the (perhaps, for Hinton, unintended) ‘play’ that such activity necessarily entails.

In the previous chapter I noted that before Hinton could justify attempts to obtain experimental proof of the fourth dimension, he needed to demonstrate that it was possible to imagine it. Because Hinton's methodology is founded in analogy, the fourth dimension can only be represented through a series of relations. My focus in the present chapter is on how Hinton attempted to represent the fourth dimension in his first series of Scientific Romances (1884–1886). This series includes individual texts that were published first as pamphlets and later collected into a single volume.