A New Era of Thought is a non-fiction work written by Charles Howard Hinton, published in 1888 and reprinted in 1900 by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd., London. A New Era of Thought is about four-dimensional space and its implications on human thinking. The preface was written by Alicia Boole and H. John Falk. They also rewrote Part II which Hinton had sketched. The book has xvi and 230 pages.
Contents
Context
A New Era of Thought is inspired by Plato's allegory of the cave and is influenced by the works of Immanuel Kant, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Nikolai Lobachevsky. It influenced the work of P.D. Ouspensky, particularly his book Tertium Organum where it is frequently quoted; Scientific American writer Martin Gardner, who mentioned this book in some of his articles; and Rudy Rucker's The Fourth Dimension.
Synopsis
A New Era of Thought consists of two parts. The first part is a collection of philosophical and mathematical essays on the fourth dimension. These essays are somewhat disconnected. They teach the possibility of thinking four-dimensionally and about the religious and philosophical insights thus obtainable. In the second part Hinton develops a system of coloured cubes. These cubes serve as model to get a four-dimensional perception as a basis of four-dimensional thinking. This part describes how to visualize a tesseract by looking at several 3-D cross sections of it. The system of cubic models in A New Era of Thought is a forerunner of the cubic models in Hinton's book The Fourth Dimension.
Contents
Preface
Table of Contents
Introductory Note to Part I
Part I
Introduction
Chapter I.
Scepticism and Science.
Beginning of Knowledge.
Chapter II.
Apprehension of Nature.
Intelligence.
Study of Arrangement or Shape.
Chapter III.
The Elements of Knowledge.
Chapter IV.
Theory and Practice.
Chapter V.
Knowledge: Self-Elements.
Chapter VI.
Function of Mind.
Space against Metaphysics.
Self-Limitations and its Test.
A Plane World.
Chapter VII.
Self Elements in our Consciousness.
Chapter VIII.
Relation of Lower and Higher Space.