"Abbott, Edwin A - Flatland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Abbott Edwin A)

left the room triumphant.
"Does this still seem strange to you? Then put yourself in a
similar position. Suppose a person of the Fourth Dimension,
condescending to visit you, were to say, 'Whenever you open your eyes,
you see a Plane (which is of Two Dimensions) and you _infer_ a Solid
(which is of Three); but in reality you also see (though you do not
recognize) a Fourth Dimension, which is not colour nor brightness nor
anything of the kind, but a true Dimension, although I cannot point
out to you its direction, nor can you posssibly measure it.' What
would you say to such a visitor? Would not you have him locked up?
Well, that is my fate: and it is as natural for us Flatlanders to
lock up a Square for preaching the Third Dimension, as it is for you
Spacelanders to lock up a Cube for preaching the Fourth. Alas, how
strong a family likeness runs through blind and persecuting humanity
in all Dimensions! Points, Lines, Squares, Cubes, Extra-Cubes -- we
are all liable to the same errors, all alike the Slavers of our
respective Dimensional prejudices, as one of our Spaceland poets has
said --

'One touch of Nature makes all worlds akin.'" (footnote 1)

On this point the defence of the Square seems to me to be
impregnable. I wish I could say that his answer to the second (or
moral) objection was equally clear and cogent. It has been objected
that he is a woman-hater; and as this objection has been vehemently
urged by those whom Nature's decree has constituted the somewhat
larger half of the Spaceland race, I should like to remove it, so far
as I can honestly do so. But the Square is so unaccustomed to the use
of the moral terminology of Spaceland that I should be doing him an
injustice if I were literally to transcribe his defence against this
charge. Acting, therefore, as his interpreter and summarizer, I
gather that in the course of an imprisonment of seven years he has
himself modified his own personal views, both as regards Women and as
regards the Isosceles or Lower Classes. Personally, he now inclines
to the opinion of the Sphere (see page 86) that the Straight Lines are
in many important respects superior to the Circles. But, writing as a
Historian, he has identified himself (perhaps too closely) with the
views generally adopted by Flatland, and (as he has been informed)
even by Spaceland, Historians; in whose pages (until very recent
times) the destinies of Women and of the masses of mankind have seldom
been deemed worthy of mention and never of careful consideration.
In a still more obscure passage he now desires to disavow the
Circular or aristocratic tendencies with which some critics have
naturally credited him. While doing justice to the intellectual power
with which a few Circles have for many generations maintained their
supremacy over immense multitudes of their countrymen, he believes
that the facts of Flatland, speaking for themselves without comment on
his part, declare that Revolutions cannot always be suppressed by
slaughter, and that Nature, in sentencing the Circles to infecundity,
has condemned them to ultimate failure -- "and herein," he says, "I