Page:ScienceAndHypothesis1905.djvu/100

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

by a voluntary correlative movement, just as we do.

If they construct a geometry, it will not be like ours, which is the study of the movements of our invariable solids; it will be the study of the changes of position which they will have thus distinguished, and will be "non-Euclidean displacements," and this will be non-Euclidean geometry. So that beings like ourselves, educated in such a world, will not have the same geometry as ours.

The World of Four Dimensions.—Just as we have pictured to ourselves a non-Euclidean world, so we may picture a world of four dimensions.

The sense of light, even with one eye, together with the muscular sensations relative to the movements of the eyeball, will suffice to enable us to conceive of space of three dimensions. The images of external objects are painted on the retina, which is a plane of two dimensions; these are perspectives. But as eye and objects are movable, we see in succession different perspectives of the same body taken from different points of view. We find at the same time that the transition from one perspective to another is often accompanied by muscular sensations. If the transition from the perspective A to the perspective B, and that of the perspective A′ to the perspective B′ are accompanied by the same muscular sensations, we connect them as we do other operations of the same nature. Then when we study the laws