I The Quest of Freedom
The Undiscovered Country—Miracles—The Failure of Common Sense—The Function of Science—Mathematics—Intuition—Our Sense of Space—The Subjectivity of Space—The Need of an Enlarged Space-Concept.
II The Dimensional Ladder
Learning to Think in Terms of Spaces—From the Cosmos to the Corpuscle—And Beyond—Evolution as Space-Conquest—Dimensional Sequences—Man the Geometer—Higher, and Highest, Space.
III Physical Phenomena
Looking for the Greater in the Less—Symmetry—Other Allied
Phenomena—Isomerism—The Orbital Motion of Spheres: Cell-Subdivision—
The Electric Current—The Greater Universe—A Hint from Astronomy—
Gravitation—The Ether of Space.
IV Transcendental Physics
Zöllner—Apparitions—Possession—Clairvoyance in Space—Clairvoyance in Time—Pisgah Sights of Life’s Pageant.
V Curved Time
Time from the Standpoint of Experiment and of Conscious Experience— Relativity—The Spoon-Man—The Orbital Movement of Time—Materiality the Mirror of Consciousness—Periodicity.
VI Sleep and Dreams
Sleep—Dreams—Time in Dreams—The Eastern Teaching in regard to Sleep and Dreams—Space in Dreams—The Phenomenon of Pause.
VII The Night Side of Consciousness
The Field of Psychic Research—Modifying the Past—Karma and Reincarnation—Colonel De Rochas’ Experiments.
VIII The Eastern Teaching
Oriental Physics and Metaphysics—The Self-Recovered Memory of past Births—Release.
IX The Mystics
Hermes Trismegistus—The Page and the Press—The Ship and its Captain—Direct Vision—Plato’s Shadow-Watchers—Swedenborg—Man, the Space-Eater—The Within and Without—Intuition and Reason—The Coil of Life.
X Genius
Immanence—Timelessness—Beyond Good and Evil: Beauty—The Daemonic— “A Dream and a Forgetting”—The Play of Brahm.
XI The Gift of Freedom
Concept and Conduct—Selflessness—Humility—Solidarity—Live Openly— Non-Resistance to Evil—The Immanent Divine.
I the Quest of Freedom
The Undiscovered Country
Expectancy of freedom is the dominant note of to-day. Amid the crash of armies and the clash of systems we await some liberating stroke which shall release us from the old dreary thralldoms. As Nietzsche says, “It would seem as though we had before us, as a reward for all our toils, a country still undiscovered, the horizons of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to every country and every refuge of the ideal that man has ever known, a world so overflowing with beauty, strangeness, doubt, terror and divinity, that both our curiosity and our lust of possession are frantic with eagerness.”
Should a name be demanded for this home of freedom, there are those who would unhesitatingly call it The Fourth Dimension of Space. For such readers as may be ignorant of the amazing content of this seemingly meaningless phrase, any summary attempt at enlightenment will lead only to deeper mystification. To the question, where and what is the fourth dimension, the answer must be, it is here—in us, and all about us—in a direction toward which we can never point because at right angles to all the directions that we know. Our space cannot contain it, because it contains our space. No walls separate us from this demesne, not even the walls of our fleshly prison; yet we may not enter, even though we are already “there.” It is the place of dreams, of living dead men: it is At the Back of the North Wind and Behind the Looking Glass.
So might one go on, piling figure upon figure and paradox upon paradox, to little profit. The effective method is the ordered and deliberate one; therefore the author asks of his reader the endurance of his curiosity pending certain necessary preparations of the mind.