vi SPECULATIONS ON THE fOURTH DIMENSION

The Mystery of Pain, a little book which sets forth the Panglossian thesis that "all that which we feel as painful is really giving-something that our fellows are better for, even though we cannot trace it." It gives some idea of the tum of the son CQaries Hinton's mind to lea:rn that he wrote a piece, "The Persian King," in which he attempted to use higher dimensions and infinite series to obtain a mathematically accurate model of this idea. Charles Howard Hinton was a professional mathematician-he took the master's degree at Oxford, taught at Princeton, and published pure mathematics related to work of Morley, Hamilton, and Cayley-but for him formal mathematics was never an end in itself. Hinton's touchstone was, rather, dir«t and intuitive knowledge of four-dimensional space. The bulk of his writings are aimed at developing in the reader the power to think about 4-D space; and the rest of his work focuses on using a knowledge of higher space to solve various problems in physics and in metaphysics. Hinton was born in London in 1853, the first son in his family. He was schooled at Rugby, and matriculated at Oxford in 1871. From a letter written to him by his father in 1869, we learn that already while at Rugby, Hinton evidenced an interest in "studying geometry as an exercise of dirttt perttption." After two yean at Oxford, he was granted a three-year term as Exhibitioner of Balliol College in the University. This meant that the college paid him a stipend or "exhibition" to pursue his studies there. On the strength of this honor, Hinton obtained a post as Assistant Master at the Cheltenham Ladies' College in 1875. He continued his studies at Oxford, some 50 miles distant from Cheltenham, receiving his B.A. in 1877. In 1880, he left Cheltenham to teach at the Up-pingham School, where he remained until he received his M.A. from Oxford in 1886. It is during the decade 1877-1887 that Hinton found his life work. vi SPECULATIONS ON THE fOURTH DIMENSION Of this period he writes in A New Era of Thought that, "I found myself in respect to knowledge like a man who is in the midst of plenty and yet who cannot find anything to eat. All around me were the evidences of knowledge-the arts, the sciences, interesting talk, useful inventions-and yet I myself was profited nothing at all; for somehow, …