Man’s interest having in these latter days become largely centered on value-judgments and estimates of worth, an exposition affords perhaps the most general application of the principle of relativity, bringing it home to the collective mind in an intimately human way as nothing else could:  — With nation vying with nation and individual with individual in all of the arts and crafts of human industry, absolute standards must needs vanish, and with their going we may be able to set up such a distribution of values as will give new direction to our efforts.  However that may be, the industrial competition to which, in the last analysis, the Exposition owes its inception, is pushing many aside from the beaten highways into hitherto unexplored regions of thought and endeavor, and who is to say that we may not in consequence find a direction quite at right angles to all of our wonted ways of thinking.  Certainly there could be no more fitting occasion for the launching of a new thought-form than a great international exposition.

The Fourth-Dimensional
Aspects of the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
   That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. 
Consider it well:  each tone of our scale in itself is naught: 
   It is everywhere in the world — loud, soft, and all is said: 
Give it to me to use!  I mix it with two in my thought: 
   And there!  Ye have heard and seen:  consider and bow the head!

   — Browning.

The Panama-Pacific International Exposition is best seen in its fourth-dimensional aspect when approached through the Gateway of Memory.  This is what one might expect, for that entrance alone has the requisite geometrical structure.  You will recall having heard, I am sure, how in the fourth dimension a person may go in and out of a locked room at his pleasure with bolts and bars untouched.  Broad and open as is this Gate of Memory, when you pass its portals the wall closes behind you; there is no visible opening to mark the spot of your entry.  A feeling of detachment comes over you.  This is augmented by the burst of light and color that flashes across the field of your vision, and for the first time you understand the purport of those ’banners yellow, glorious, golden’ which ‘do float and flow.’  They seem to bear you on breezes of their own creating to the freedom of outer spaces.  What you had taken for the flauntings of festivity are become the heralds of hyperspace.

As you wend your way down the Avenue of Time you feel an inexpressive lightness, a sensation of being lifted out of yourself.  The moment seems unique.  Things are unrelated.  There is no concern of proportion.  The place is one of immediacy.  You wander from the ephemeral to the ephemeral.  ‘Time is,’ you say, in childish glee.  And you hasten to assemble images as many and as disparate as possible, believing that you are drinking life at its fountain head.  The outer world presents itself to your consciousness in the form of facts in juxtaposition.  You read guide-books and rejoice in the acquisition of knowledge.  Gradually through the perception of the same phantasmagoria comes an at-oneness with your fellows.  You are caught up in the swirl of a larger self.