The Ether of Space
The ether of space, because it has at last found entrance, must be given a grudging hospitality in these pages, even though the mysterious stranger prove but a ghost. The Relativists would have it that with the acceptance of their point of view the ether may be eliminated; but if they take away the ether, they must give us something in its stead. In whatever way the science of the future disposes of this problem, it must take into account the fact of light transmission. On the theory that the ether is an elastic solid of amazing properties, in which the light waves vibrate transversely to their direction, it assists the mind to think of the ether as four-dimensional, because then a light wave would be a superficial disturbance of the medium—superficial, but three-dimensional, as must needs be the case with the surface of a four-dimensional solid.
This search for evidences of hyper-dimensionality in the universe accessible to our senses is like looking, not for a needle in a haystack, but for a haystack in a needle—for the greater in the less. From the purely physical evidences, all that can with certainty be said is that the hypothesis is not inconsistent with the facts of science or its laws; that it is being verified and rendered more probable by the investigations of science; that it is applicable to the description or explanation of all the observed phenomena, and assigns a cause fully adequate to have produced them.
Now there is an order of phenomena that we call psychic. Because they are phenomenal they cannot occur outside of time and space altogether; because they are psychic they defy explanation in terms of the space and time of every-day life. Let us next examine these in the light of our hypothesis.