ain is useful; if he could never leave the
train nor alter its pace he would probably consider the landscapes as
necessarily successive and be unable to conceive their co-existence....
We perceive, therefore, a possible fourth dimensional aspect about time,
the inexorableness of whose flow may be a natural part or our present
limitations. And if we once grasp the idea that past and future may be
actually existing, we can recognize that they may have a controlling
influence on all present action, and the two together may constitute the
'higher plane' or totality of things after which, as it seems to me, we
are impelled to seek, in connection with the directing of form or
determinism, and the action of living beings consciously directed to a
definite and preconceived end."

Time is not in reality the fourth dimension at all; yet to look at it
for the moment from that point of view is some slight help towards
grasping the ungraspable. Suppose that we hold a wooden cone at right
angles to a sheet of paper, and slowly push it through it point first.
A microbe living on the surface of that sheet of paper, and having no
power of conceiving anything outside of that surface, could not only
never see the cone as a whole, but he could form no sort of conception
of such a body at all. All that he would see would be the sudden
appearance of a tiny circle, which would gradually and mysteriously
grow larger and larger until it vanished from his world as suddenly
and incomprehensibly as it had come into it.

Thus, what were in reality a series of sections of the cone would
appear to him to be successive stages in the life of a circle, and it
would be impossible for him to grasp the idea that these successive
stages could be seen simultaneously. Yet it is, of course, easy enough
for us, looking down upon the transaction from another dimension, to
see that the microbe is simply under a delusion arising from its own
limitations, and that the cone exists as a whole all the while. Our
own delusion as to past, present, and future is possibly not
dissimilar, and the view that is gained of any sequence of events from
the buddhic plane corresponds to the view of the cone as a whole.
Naturally, any attempt to work out this suggestion lands us in a
series of startling paradoxes; but the fact remains a fact,
nevertheless, and the time will come when it will be clear as noonday
to our comprehension.

When the pupil's consciousness is fully devel