While a man’s space-world is limited by his thought, it is, on the other hand, as boundless as his thought.  That the world evolves with our consciousness, is at once the philosophy of ‘Creative Evolution’ and of the higher space theory.  Our present spatial milieu has settled down to a seemingly three dimensional finality because our thought-form has become so habitual as to give rise to certain geometric axioms.  All we need in order to come to a fourth-dimensional consciousness, said Henri Poincare, ‘the greatest of moderns,’ is a new table of distribution; that is, a breaking up of old associations of ideas and the forming of new relations — a simple matter were it not for our mental inertia.  Lester Ward speculates that life remained aquatic for the vast periods that paleontology would indicate; Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous — a duration greater than all subsequent time — for the reason that the creature had not progressed beyond the stage when it could move otherwise than in a straight line when actuated by desire for food or mate.  Life was not able to maintain itself on land until it had overcome this one-dimensional limitation.  A venturesome Pterodactyl was he who first essayed to make his way among the many obstructions to be found ashore!  By what intuition was he impelled?

It is a matter of common observation that the growth of the higher perceptive faculty is strangely concomitant with adversity.  The intuitive person is a person who has suffered.  When conditions press sufficiently hard, a new table of distribution may be the only means for survival.  Thus we proceed to make a virtue of necessity and so come to the recognition of other values which we denominate spiritual because we have not as yet spatialized them.  The caterpillar has to mount the twig to find the tender green that is his food, but, he solaces himself for the journey by thinking himself a creature of the light.  Mr. Carpenter, in an interesting study of what he calls Intermediate Types, shows that the seers and spiritually-minded come to be such because they found themselves differing in some wise from their fellows, and dwelling on that difference had their minds turned inward.  Progress in thought and imagination naturally followed, with the result that these were lifted above the majority and came thereby to larger vision.  Failure may well be the measure of extension in a new dimension.

The significance of the much fumbling and groping of earth’s creatures is the desire for a larger outlook.  Man has to feel his way out of a three-fold world even as the worm out of his hole.  That we are hearing much of the principle of relativity is perhaps the best indication we have that the collective human consciousness is about to enter a higher dimension.  So long as man knew only an absolute good was his world a definitely determined world.  Now that the question of relative values obtrudes itself on every side the range of consciousness promises to be infinite.