* * * *

* * * * The Brazen Head spake again these words:  ‘Time is past’; and therewith fell down and presently followed a terrible noise, with strange flashes of fire, so that Miles was half dead with fear.  At this noise the two Friars waked and wondered to see the whole room so full of smoke, but that being vanished, they might perceive the Brazen Head broken and lying on the ground.  At this sight they grieved, and called Miles to know how this came.  Miles, half dead with fear, said that it fell down of itself and that with the noise and fire that followed he was almost frightened out of his wits.  Friar Bacon asked him if it did not speak.

‘Yes,’ quoth Miles, ‘it spake, but to no purpose.’

General Status of the Fourth-Dimensional Theory

The human mind has so long followed its early cow-paths through the wilderness of sense that great hardihood is required even to suggest that there may be other and better ways of traversing the empirical common.  So it is that the fear of being proclaimed a Brazenhead has restrained me until this eleventh hour from telling of my discoveries concerning the fourth-dimensional reaches of our Exposition.  That I have the courage now is due to my desire to help in its preservation; not to the end of enclosing it in a brass wall, but to lift it out of the realm of things temporal and give it permanent meaning for our thought and aspiration.  Would we save our Exposition from the ravages of Time we have to exorcise that monster with the enigmatical utterances of the aforesaid Brazen Head.  The philosophers are telling us that Time is the fourth dimension in the process of evolving for our consciousness.  I take it that there are three stages in this evolution; the first, that of immediate experience, is subsumed by the phrase ‘Time is’; the second is a passing from the concrete to the abstract through the fact that ‘Time was’; and the glory of the last is visioned only when we can say ‘Time is past.’

While many books have been written descriptive of the Exposition, none has succeeded in accounting completely for the joy we have in yonder miracle of beauty.  And this through no fault of the writers.  When all has been said concerning plan and execution there is still a subtle something not spatialized for consciousness.  Length, breadth, and height do not suffice to set forth the ways of our delight in it.  What of this perceptual residue?  Obviously to give it extension we shall have to ascribe to reality other dimensions than those of our present sense realm.  Some disciple of Bergson interrupts:  ’Ah, this whereof you speak is a spiritual thing and as such is given by the intuition.  Why, then, do you seek to spatialize it?’ And the layman out of his mental repugnance to things mathematical echoes, ‘Why?’ We have to answer that the process of creative evolution makes imperative the transfixion by the intellect