THE FOURTH DIMENSION SIMPLY EXPLAINED

Page 9 that the axioms chosen for a geometry shall be consistent; they must not contradict one another. They ought also to be independent; no statement should be taken as an axiom if it necessarily follows from the other axioms. Finally, the set of axioms should be complete, so that the geometry is completely determined without requiring additional axioms.

We choose, then, one of these geometries and apply it to our lives. We choose that geometry whose axioms and resulting theorems seem best to express the conditions of our existence, but this choice is not a part of mathematical reasoning; it is a matter of experiment and of experience. Finally, the mathematician may go still further and leave undefined the subject matter of his geometry. He takes certain elements, calling them points and lines, and certain relations which he calls relations of position and magnitude. Without defining the elements or the relations he assumes that the elements have these relations. The statements that the elements have the relations are his axioms. From the axioms he derives other relations which necessarily follow. The statements of these relations are his theorems. This is abstract geometry.1 The terms used are meaningless, whether they are the words point, line, intersect, etc., borrowed from the ordinary geometry, or new words invented for the purpose. It is easier, of course, to assign meanings to the terms at the beginning and give to the geometry a concrete form as it develops, especially if the concrete form is not too difficult for us to picture in our minds, but it is possible to construct the geometry abstractly and then to apply it by giving concrete meanings to its terms. By
Page 10 changing the meanings of the terms we can give to he same geometry more than one interpretation even when the geometry is first constructed in concrete form.

When the student gets this view of geometry fixed in his mind he is more ready to entertain the notion of a geometry of four or more dimensions. He sees no difficulty in assuming a set of axioms which includes the hypothesis that there are points outside of a given space of three dimensions when points and space are themselves words without meaning. The difficulty which he meets in contemplating such a geometry or any geometry comes when he attempts to apply it to our existence or to some imagined existence where its application seems to contradict or to transcend our experience. We have said that the same geometry can have more than one interpretation. Thus we shall see presently that a certain two-dimensional geometry may be interpreted as spherical geometry if we make the term straight line mean great circle. With a proper definition of length or distance our ordinary geometry may be interpreted as a geometry in which the circles through a certain fixed point are taken for straight lines. And so we might give other illustrations. Now the abstract geometry of four dimensions may be realized as a concrete geometry by letting the word point mean straight line in our space. It takes four numbers to determine the position of a straight line, and all the relations of the Geometry of Four Dimensions are represented by relations of these lines and by figures formed of them.2 But these interpretations seem far-fetched, and the

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