“You were not yourself able to enter this new world,” interrupted Dr. Silence.

“Not then.  I was only able to conceive intuitively what it was like and how exactly it must look.  Later, when I slipped in there and saw objects in their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor three measurements, I very nearly lost my life.  For, you see, space does not stop at a single new dimension, a fourth.  It extends in all possible new ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of new dimensions.  In other words, there is no space at all, but only a spiritual condition.  But, meanwhile, I had come to grasp the strange fact that the objects in our normal world appear to us only partially.”

Mr. Mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously on the very edge of the chair.  “From this starting point,” he resumed, “I began my studies and experiments, and continued them for years.  I had money, and I was without friends.  I lived in solitude and experimented.  My intellect, of course, had little part in the work, for intellectually it was all unthinkable.  Never was the limitation of mere reason more plainly demonstrated.  It was mystically, intuitively, spiritually that I began to advance.  And what I learnt, and knew, and did is all impossible to put into language, since it all describes experiences transcending the experiences of men.  It is only some of the results—­what you would call the symptoms of my disease—­that I can give you, and even these must often appear absurd contradictions and impossible paradoxes.

“I can only tell you, Dr. Silence”—­his manner became exceedingly impressive—­“that I reached sometimes a point of view whence all the great puzzle of the world became plain to me, and I understood what they call in the Yoga books ‘The Great Heresy of Separateness’; why all great teachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as himself; how men are all really one; and why the utter loss of self is necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the soul.”

He paused a moment and drew breath.

“Your speculations have been my own long ago,” the doctor said quietly.  “I fully realise the force of your words.  Men are doubtless not separate at all—­in the sense they imagine—­”

“All this about the very much Higher Space I only dimly, very dimly, conceived, of course,” the other went on, raising his voice again by jerks; “but what did happen to me was the humbler accident of—­the simpler disaster—­oh, dear, how shall I put it—?”

He stammered and showed visible signs of distress.

“It was simply this,” he resumed with a sudden rush of words, “that, accidentally, as the result of my years of experiment, I one day slipped bodily into the next world, the world of four dimensions, yet without knowing precisely how I got there, or how I could get back again.  I discovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body was but an expression—­a projection—­of my higher four-dimensional body!