Clairvoyance in Space
Vision at a distance and the exercise of a superior power of sight.
Clairvoyance in space is of various kinds and degrees. Sometimes it consists in the perception of super-physical phenomena—the unfurling of a strange and wonderful land; and again it appears to be a higher power of ordinary vision, a kind of seeing to which the opacity of solids offers no impediment, or one involving spatial distances too great and too impeded for normal physical vision to be effective.
That clairvoyance which consists in the ability to perceive not alone the superficies of things as ordinary vision perceives them, but their interiors as well, is analogous to the power given by the X-ray, by means of which, on a fluorescent screen, a man may behold the beating of his own heart. But, if the reports of trained clairvoyants are to be believed, there is this difference: everything appears to them without the distortions due to perspective, objects being seen as though they were inside and not outside of the perceiving organ, or as though the observer were in the object perceived; or in all places at the same time.
Our analogy makes all this intelligible. To the flat-man, clairvoyance in space would consist in that power of perception which we exercise in reference to his plane. From the third dimension the boundaries of plane figures offer no impediment to the view of their interiors, and they themselves in no way impede our vision of surrounding objects. If we assume that clairvoyance in space is the perception of the things of our world from the region of the fourth dimension, the phenomena exactly conform to the demands of our analogy. It is no more difficult for a four-dimensional intelligence to understand the appearance or disappearance of a body in a completely closed room, or the withdrawal of an orange from its skin, without cutting or breaking that skin, than it is for us to see the possibility of taking up a pencil point from the center of a circle and putting it down outside. We are under no compulsion to draw a line across the circumference of the circle in order to enter or leave it. Moreover, the volume of our sensible universe embraced in the clairvoyant’s field of view will increase in the same way that a balloonist’s view increases in area as he rises above the surface of the earth. To account for clairvoyant vision at a distance, it is of course necessary to posit some perceptive organ other than the eye, but the fact that in trance the eyes are closed, itself demands this assumption.