Mr. Spalding had gone out into the garden to find peace, and had not found it. He sat there, with hunched shoulders and bowed head, dejected in the spring sunshine.

Jerry, the black cat, invited him to play; he stood on his hind legs and danced, and bowed sideways, and waved his forelegs in the air like wings. At any other time his behaviour would have enchanted Mr. Spalding, but now he couldn’t even look at him; he was too miserable.

He had gone to bed miserable; he had passed a night of misery, and he had waked up more miserable than ever. He had been like that for three days and three nights straight on end, and no wonder. It wasn’t only that his young wife Elizabeth had run away with Paul Jeffreson, the Imagist poet. Besides the frailty of Elizabeth, he had discovered a fatal flaw in his own system of metaphysics. His belief in Elizabeth was gone. So was his belief in the Absolute.

The two things had come at once, to crush him. And he had to own bitterly that they were not altogether unrelated. “If,” Mr. Spalding said to himself, “I had served my wife as faithfully as I have served my God, she would not now have deserted me for Paul Jeffreson.” He meant that if he had not been wrapped up in his system of metaphysics, Elizabeth might still have been wrapped up in him. He had nobody but himself to thank for her behaviour.

If she had run away with anybody else, since run she must, he might have forgiven her; he might have forgiven himself; but there could be nothing but misery in store for Elizabeth. Paul Jeffreson had genius, Mr. Spalding didn’t deny it; immortal genius; but he had no morals; he drank; he drugged; in Mr. Spalding’s decent phrase, he did everything he shouldn’t do.

You would have thought this overwhelming disaster would have completely outweighed the other trouble. But no; Mr. Spalding had a balanced mind; he mourned with equal sorrow the loss of his wife and the loss of his Absolute. A flaw in a metaphysical system may seem to you a small thing; but you must bear in mind that, ever since he could think at all, Mr. Spalding had been devoured by a hunger and thirst after metaphysical truth. He had flung over the God he had been taught to believe in because, besides being an outrage to Mr. Spalding’s moral sense, he wasn’t metaphysical enough. The poor man was always worrying about metaphysics; he wandered from system to system, seeking truth, seeking reality, seeking some supreme intellectual satisfaction that never came. He thought he had found it in his theory of Absolute Pantheism. But really, Spalding’s Pantheism, anybody’s Pantheism for that matter, couldn’t, when you brought it down to bed-rock thinking, hold water for a minute. And the more Absolute he made it, the leakier it was.

For, consider, on Mr. Spalding’s theory, there isn’t any reality except the Absolute. Things are only real because they exist in It; because It is Them. Mr. Spalding conceived that his consciousness and Elizabeth’s consciousness and Paul Jeffreson’s consciousness existed somehow in the Absolute unchanged. For, if that inside existence changed them you would have to say that the ground of their present appearance lay somewhere outside the Absolute, which to Mr. Spalding was rank blasphemy. And if Elizabeth and Paul Jeffreson existed in the Absolute unchanged, then their adultery existed there unchanged. And an adultery within the Absolute outraged his moral sense as much as anything he had been told about God in his youth. The odd thing was that until Elizabeth had run away and committed it he had never thought of that. The metaphysics of Pantheism had interested him much more than its ethics. And now he could think of nothing else.

And it wasn’t only Elizabeth and her iniquity; there were all the intolerable people he had ever known. There was his Uncle Sims, a mean sneak if ever there was one; and his Aunt Emily, a silly fool; and his cousin, Tom Rumbold, an obscene idiot. And his uncle’s mean sneak-ishness, and his aunt’s silly folly, and his cousin’s obscene idiocy would have to exist in the Absolute, too; and unchanged, mind you.

And the things you see and hear—A blue sky, now, would it be blue in the Sight of God, or just something inconceivable? And noises, music? For example, I am listening to Grand Opera, and you to the jazz band in your restaurant; but the God of Pantheism is listening to both, to all the noises in the universe at once. As if He had sat down on the piano. This idea shocked Mr. Spalding even more than the thought of Elizabeth’s misconduct.

Time went on. Paul Jeffreson drank himself to death. Elizabeth, worn out with grief, died of pneumonia following influenza; and Mr. Spalding still went about worrying over his inadjustable metaphysics.

And at last he, too, found himself dying.

And then he began to worry about other things. Things that had, as he put it, “happened” in his youth, before he knew Elizabeth, and one thing that had happened after she left him. He thought of them as just happening; happening to him rather than through him, against his will. In calm, philosophic moments he couldn’t conceive how they had ever happened at all, how, for example, he could have endured Connie Larkins. The episodes had been brief, because in each case boredom and disgust had supervened to put asunder what Mr. Spalding owned should never have been joined. Brief, insignificant as they were, Mr. Spalding, in his dying state, was worried when he looked back on them. Supposing they were more significant than they had seemed? Supposing they had an eternal significance and entailed tremendous consequences in the after-life? Supposing you were not just wiped out, that there really was an after-life? Supposing that in that other world there was a hell?

Mr. Spalding could imagine no worse hell than the eternal repetition of such incidents; eternal repetition of boredom and disgust. Fancy going on with Connie Larkins for ever and ever, never being able to get away from her, doomed to repeat—And, if there was an Absolute, if there was reality, truth, never knowing it; being cut off from it for ever—

“He that is filthy let him be filthy still.”

That was hell, the continuance of the filthy state.

He wondered whether goodness was not, after all, the important thing; he wondered whether there really was a next world; with an extreme uneasiness he wondered what would happen to him in it.

He died wondering.

His first thought was: Well, here I am again. I’ve not been wiped out. His next, that he hadn’t died at all. He had gone to sleep and was now dreaming. He was not in the least agitated, nor even surprised.

He found himself alone in an immense grey space, in which there was no distinguishable object but himself. He was aware of his body as occupying a portion of this space. For he had a body; a curious, tenuous, whitish body. The odd thing was that this empty space had a sort of solidity under him. He was lying on it, stretched out on it, adrift. It supported him with the buoyancy of deep water. And yet his body was part of it, netted in.

He was now aware of two figures approaching. They came and stood, like figures treading water, one on each side of him, and he saw that they were Elizabeth and Paul Jeffreson.

Then he concluded that he was really dead; dead like Elizabeth and Jeffreson, and (since they were there) that he was in hell.

Elizabeth was speaking, and her voice sounded sweet and very kind. All the same he knew he was in hell.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s queer at first, but you’ll get used to it. You don’t mind our coming to meet you?”

Mr. Spalding said he’d no business to mind, no right to reproach her, since they were all in the same boat. They had, all three, deserved their punishment.

“Punishment?” (Jeffreson spoke). “Why, where does he think he is?”

“I’m in hell, aren’t I? If—”

“If we’re here. Is that it?”

“Well, Jeffreson, I don’t want to rake up old unpleasantness, but after—after what happened, you’ll forgive my saying so, but what else can I think?”

He heard Jeffreson laugh; a perfectly natural laugh.

“Will you tell him, Elizabeth, or shall I?”

“You’d better. He always respected your intelligence.”

“Well, old chap, if you really want to know where you are, you’re in heaven.”

“You don’t mean to say so?”

“Fact. I daresay you’re wondering what we’re doing here?”

“Well, Elizabeth—perhaps. But, frankly, Jeffreson,

“Yes. How about me?”

“With your record I should have thought you’d even less business here than I have.”

“Wouldn’t you? I lived on unpaid bills. I drank. I drugged. There was nothing I didn’t do. What do you suppose I got in on? You’ll never guess.”

“No. No. I give it up.”

“My love of beauty. You wouldn’t think it, but it seems that actually counts here, in the eternal world.”

“And Elizabeth, what did she get in on?”

“Her love of me.”

“Then all I can say is,” said Mr. Spalding, “Heaven must be a most immoral place.”

“Oh, no. Your parochial morality doesn’t hold good here, that’s all. Why should it? It’s entirely relative. Relative to a social system with limits in time and space. Relative to a certain biological configuration that ceased with our terrestrial organisms. Not absolute. Not eternal.

“But beauty—Beauty is eternal, is absolute. And I—I loved beauty more than credit, more than drink or drugs or women, more even than Elizabeth.

“And love is eternal. And Elizabeth loved me more than you, more than respectability, more than peace and comfort, and a happy life.”

“That’s all very well, Jeffreson; and Elizabeth may be all right. Mary Magdalene, you know. Quia mulium amavit, and so forth. But if a blackguard like you can slip into heaven as easily as all that, where are our ethics?”

“Your ethics, my dear Spalding, are where they’ve always been, where you came from, not here. And if I was what they call a bad man, that’s to say a bad terrestrial organism, I was a thundering good poet. You say I slipped in easily; do you suppose it’s easy to be a poet? My dear fellow, it requires an inflexibility, a purity, a discipline of mind—of mind, remember—that you haven’t any conception of. And surely you should be the last person in the world to regard mind as an inferior secondary affair. Anyhow, the consequence is that I’ve not only got into heaven, I’ve got into one of the best heavens, a heaven reserved exclusively for the very finest spirits.”

“Then,” said Mr. Spalding, “if we’re in heaven, who’s in hell?”

“Couldn’t say for certain. But we shouldn’t put it that way. We should say: Who’s gone back to earth?”

“Well—am I likely to meet Uncle Sims, or Aunt Emily, or Tom Rumbold here? You remember them, Elizabeth?”

“Oh, yes, I remember. They’d be almost certain to be sent back. They couldn’t stand eternal things. There’s nothing eternal about meanness and stupidity and nastiness.”

“What’ll happen to them, do you suppose?”

“What should you say, Paul?”

“I should say they’d suffer damnably till they’d got some bigness and intelligence and decency knocked into them.”

“It’ll be a sell for Aunt Emily. She was brought up to believe that stupidity was no drawback to getting into heaven.”

“Lots of people,” said Jeffreson, “will be sold. Like my father, the Dean of Eastminster; he was cocksure he’d get in; but they won’t let him. And why, do you suppose? Because the poor old boy couldn’t see that my poems were beautiful.

“But even that wouldn’t have dished him, if he’d had a passion for anybody; or if he’d cared two straws about metaphysical truth. Your truth, Spalding.”

“Bless me, all our preconceived ideas seem to have been wrong.”

“Yes. Even I wasn’t prepared for that. By the way, that’s what you got in on, your passion for truth. It’s like my passion for beauty.”

“But—aren’t you distressed about your father, Jeffreson?”

“Oh, no. He’ll get into some heaven or other some day. He’ll find out that he cares for somebody, perhaps. Then he’ll be all right— But don’t you want to look about a bit?”

“I don’t see very much to look at. It strikes me as a bit bare, your heaven.”

“Oh, that’s because you’re only at the landing-state.”

“The landing what?”

“State. What we used to call landing place. Times and spaces here, you know, are states. States of mind.”

Mr. Spalding sat up, excited. “But—but that’s what I always said they were. I and Kant.”

“Well, you’d better talk to him about it.”

“Talk to him? Shall I see Kant?”

“Look at him, Elizabeth. Now he’s coming alive— Of course you’ll see him when you get into your own place—state, I mean. You’d better get up and come along with me and Elizabeth. We’ll show you round.”

He rose, they steadied him, and he made his way between them through the grey immensity, over a half-seen yet perfectly solid tract of something that he thought of, absurdly, as condensed space. As yet there were no objects in sight but the figures of Elizabeth and Jeffreson; the half-seen, yet tangible floor he went on seemed to create itself out of nothing, under his feet, as the desire to walk arose in him. And as yet he had felt no interest or curiosity; but as he went on he was aware of a desire to see things that became more and more urgent. He would see. He must see. He felt that before him and around him there were endless things to be seen. His mind strained forwards towards vision.

And then, suddenly, he saw.

He saw a landscape more beautiful than anything he could have imagined. It was, Jeffreson informed him, very like the umbrella pine country between Florence and Siena. As they came out of it on a great, curving road they had their faces towards the celestial west. To the south the land fell away in great red cliffs to a shining, blue sea. Like, Jeffreson said, the Riviera, the EstÉrel. West and north the landscape rolled in green hill after green hill, pine-tufted, to a sweeping rampart of deep blue; such a rampart, such blue as Mr. Spalding had seen from the heights above Sidmouth, looking towards Dartmoor. Only this country had a grace, a harmony of line and colour that gave it an absolute beauty; and over it there lay a serene, unearthly radiance.

Before them, on a hill, was an exquisite little white, golden and rose-red town.

“You may or may not believe me,” said Jeffreson, “but the beauty of all this is that I made it. I mean Elizabeth and I made it between us.”

“You made it?”

“Made it.”

“How?”

“By thinking of it. By wanting it. By imagining it.”

“But—out of what?”

“I don’t know and I don’t much care. Our scientists here will tell you we made it out of the ultimate constituents of matter. Matter, unformed, only exists for us in its ultimate constituents. Something like electrons of electrons of electrons. Here we are all suspended in a web, immersed, if you like, in a sea, an air of this matter. It is utterly plastic to our imagination and our will. Imperceptible in its unformed state, it becomes visible and tangible as our minds get to work on it, and we can make out of it anything we want, including our own bodies. Only, so far as our imaginations are still under the dominion of our memories, so far will the things they create resemble the things we knew on earth. Thus you will notice that while Elizabeth and I are much more beautiful than we were on earth” (he had noticed it), “because we desired to be more beautiful, we are still recognizable as Paul and Elizabeth because our imaginations are controlled by our memories. You are as you always were, only younger than when we knew you, because your imagination had nothing but memory to go on. Everything you create here will probably be a replica of something on earth you remember.”

“But if I want something new, something beautiful that I haven’t seen before, can’t I have it?”

“Of course you can have it. Only, just at first, until your own imagination develops, you’ll have to come to me or Turner or Michael Angelo to make it for you.”

“And will these things that you and Turner and Michael Angelo make for me be permanent?”

“Absolutely, unless we unmade them. And I don’t think we should do that against your will. Anyhow, though we can destroy our own works we can’t destroy each other’s, that is to say, reduce them to their ultimate constituents. What’s more, we shouldn’t dream of trying.”

“Why not?”

“Because old motives don’t work here. Envy, greed, theft, robbery, murder, or any sort of destruction, are unknown. They can’t happen. Nothing alters matter here but mind, and I can’t will your body to come to pieces so long as you want it to keep together. You can’t destroy it yourself as you can other things you make, because your need of it is greater than your need of other things.

“We can’t thieve or rob for the same reason. Things that belong to us belong to our state of mind and can’t be torn away from it, so that we couldn’t remove anything from another person’s state into our own. And if we could we shouldn’t want to, because each of us can always have everything he wants. If I like your house or your landscape better than my own, I can make one for myself just like it. But we don’t do this, because we’re proud of our individualities here, and would rather have things different than the same— By the way, as you haven’t got a house yet, let alone a landscape, you’d better share ours.”

“That’s very good of you,” Mr. Spalding said. He was thinking of Oxford. Oxford. Quiet rooms in Balliol. He seemed to hesitate.

“If you’re still sitting on that old grievance of yours, I tell you, once for all, Spalding, I’m not going to express any regret. I’m not sorry, I’m glad I took Elizabeth away from you. I made her more happy than unhappy even on earth. And please notice it’s I who got her into heaven, not you. If she’d stayed with you and hated you, as she would have done, she couldn’t have got in.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” said Mr. Spalding. “I was only wondering where I could put my landscape.”

“How do you mean—‘put’ it?”

“Place it—so as not to interfere with other people’s landscapes.”

“But how on earth could you interfere? You ‘place’ it, as you call it, in your own space and in your own time.” His own space, his own time—Mr. Spalding got more and more excited.

“But—how?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you how. It simply happens.”

“But I want to understand it. I—I must understand.”

“You shouldn’t put him off like that, Paul,” Elizabeth said. “He always did want to understand things.”

“But when I don’t understand them myself—”

“You’d better take him to Kant, or Hegel.”

“I should prefer Kant,” said Mr. Spalding.

“Well, Kant then. You’ll have to get into his state first.”

“How do I do that?”

“It’s very simple. You just think him up and ask him if you can come in.”

Elizabeth explained. “Like ringing somebody up, you know, and asking if you can come and call.”

“Supposing he won’t let me.”

“Trust him to say so. Of course, we mayn’t get through. He may have thought off.”

“You can think off, can you?”

“Yes, that’s how you protect yourself. Otherwise life here would be unbearable. Just keep quiet for a second, will you?”

There was an intense silence. Presently Jeffreson said: “Now you’re through.”

And Mr. Spalding found himself in a white-washed room, scantily furnished with three rows of bookshelves, a writing-table, a table set with mysterious instruments, and two chairs. A shaded lamp on the writing-table gave light. Mr. Spalding had left the umbrella pine country blazing with sunlight, but it seemed that Kant’s time was somewhere about ten o’clock at night. The large window was bared to a dark-blue sky of stars.

A little, middle-aged man sat at the writing-table. He wore eighteenth-century clothes and a tie wig. The face that looked up at Mr. Spalding was lean and dried, the mouth tight, the eyes shining distantly with a deep, indrawn intelligence. Mr. Spalding understood that he was in the presence of Immanuel Kant.

“You thought me up?”

“Forgive me. I am James Spalding, a student of philosophy. I was told that you might, perhaps, be willing to explain to me the—the very extraordinary conditions in which I find myself.”

“May I ask, Mr. Spalding, if you have paid any particular attention to my philosophy?”

“I am one of your most devoted disciples, sir. I refuse to believe that philosophy has made any considerable advance since the Critique of Pure Reason.”

“T-t-t. My successor, Hegel, made a very considerable advance. If you have neglected Hegel—”

“Pardon me, I have not. I was once Hegel’s devoted disciple. An entrancing fantasy, the Triple Dialectic. But I came to see that yours, sir, was the safer and the saner system, and that the recurrent tendency of philosophy must be back to Kant.”

“Better say Forward with him. If you are indeed my disciple, I do not think that conditions here should have struck you as extraordinary.”

“They struck me as an extraordinary confirmation of your theory of space and time, sir.”

“They are that. They are that. But they go far beyond anything I ever dreamed of. It was not in my scheme that the Will—to which, if you remember, I gave a purely ethical and pragmatical rÔle—that the Will and the imagination of individuals, of you and me, Mr. Spalding, should create their own space and time, and their own objects in space and time. I did not anticipate this multiplicity of spaces and times. In my time there was only one space and one time for everybody.

“Still, it is a very remarkable confirmation, and you may imagine, Mr. Spalding, that I was gratified when I first came here to find everybody talking and thinking correctly about time and space. You will have noticed that here we say state, meaning state of consciousness, where we used to say place. In the same way we talk about states of time, meaning time as a state of consciousness. My present state, you will observe, is exactly ten minutes past ten by my clock, which is my consciousness. My consciousness registers time automatically. My own time, mind you, not other people’s.”

“But isn’t that frightfully inconvenient? If your time isn’t everybody else’s time, how on earth—I mean how in heaven—do you keep your appointments? How do you co-ordinate?”

“We keep appointments, we co-ordinate, exactly as we used to do, by a purely arbitrary system. We measure time by space, by events, movements in space-time. Only, whereas under earthly conditions there was apparently one earth and one sun, one day and one night for everybody, here everybody has his own earth, his own sun and his own day and night. So we are obliged to take an ideal earth and sun, an ideal day and night. Their revolutions are measured exactly as we measured them on earth, by the movements of hands on a dial marking minutes and hours. Only our public clocks have five hands marking the revolutions of weeks, months and years. That is our public standardized time, and all appointments are kept, all scientific calculations made by it. The only difference between heaven and earth is that here public space-time is regarded as it really is—an unreal, a purely arbitrary and artificial convention. We know, not as a result of philosophic or mathematical reasoning, but as part of our ordinary conscious experience, that there is no absolute space and no absolute time. I would say no real space and no real time, but that in heaven a state of consciousness carries its own reality with it as such; and the time state or the space state is as real as any other.

“Of course, without an arbitrary public space-time, a public clock, states of consciousness from individual to individual could never be co-ordinated. For example, you have come straight from Mr. Jeffreson’s twelve-noon to my ten o’clock p.m. But the public clock, which you will see out there in the street—we are in KÖnigsberg; I have no visual imagination and must rely entirely on memory for my scenery—the public dock, I say, marks time at a quarter to eight; and if I were asking Mr. Jeffreson to spend the evening with me, the hour would be fixed for us by public time at eight. But he would find himself in my time at ten.

“Now I want to point out to you, Mr. Spalding, that this way of regarding space and time is not so revolutionary as it may appear. I said, if you remember, that under terrestrial conditions there was apparently one earth and one sun, one day and night for everybody. But really, even then, everybody carried about with him his own private space and time, and his own private world in space and time. It was only, even then, by an arbitrary system of mathematical conventions, mostly geometrical, that all these private times and spaces were co-ordinated, so as to constitute one universe. Public clock time, based on the revolutions of bodies in a mathematically determined public space, was as conventional and relative an affair on earth as it is in heaven.

“Our private consciousnesses registered their own times automatically then as now, by the passage of internal events. If events passed quickly, our private time outran clock time; if they dragged, it was behindhand.

“Thus in dream experience there are many more events to the second than in waking experience; and consciousness registers by the tick-tick of events, so that in a dream we may live through crowded hours and days in the fraction of time that coincides with the knock on the door that waked us. It is absurd to say that in this case we do not live in two different time-systems.”

“Yes, and—” Mr. Spalding cried out excitedly—

“Einstein has proved that motion in public space-time is a purely relative and arbitrary thing, and that the velocity, or time value, of a ray of light moving under different conditions is a constant; when on any theory of absolute time and absolute motion it should be a variant.”

“That,” said Kant, “is no more than I should have expected.”

“You said, sir, that the only distinction between earthly and heavenly conditions is that this artificial character of standardized space-time is recognized in heaven and not on earth. I should have said that the most striking differences were, firstly, that in heaven our experience is created for us by our imagination and our will, whereas on earth it was, in your own word, sir, ‘given.’ Secondly that in heaven our states are not closed as they were on earth, but that anybody can enter anybody else’s. It seems to me that these differences are so great as to surpass anything in our experience on earth.”

“They are not so great,” said Kant, “as all that. In dreaming you already had an experience of a world created by each person for himself in a space and time of his own; a world in which you transcended the conditions of ordinary space and time. In telepathy and clairvoyance you had experience of entering other people’s states.”

“But,” Mr. Spalding said, “on earth my consciousness was dependent on a world apparently outside it, arising presumably in God’s consciousness, my body being the ostensible medium. Here, on the contrary, I have my world inside me, created by my consciousness, and my body is not so much a medium as an accessory after the fact.”

“And what inference do you draw, Mr. Spalding?”

“Why, that on earth I was nearer God, more dependent on him than in heaven. I seem to have become my own God.”

“Doesn’t it strike you that in becoming more god-like you are actually nearer God? That in this power of your imagination to conceive, this freedom of your will to create your universe, God is cutting a clearer path for himself than through that constrained and obstructed consciousness you had on earth?”

“That’s it. When I think of that appalling life of earth, the pain, sir, the horrible pain, the wickedness, the imbecility, the endless struggling through blood and filth, and being beaten, I can’t help wondering how such things can exist in the Absolute, and why the Absolute shouldn’t have put us—or as you would say, thought us into this heavenly state from the beginning.”

“Do you suppose that any finite intelligence—any finite will could have been trusted, untrained, with the power we have here? Only wills disciplined by struggling against earth’s evil, only intelligences braced by wrestling with earth’s problems are fitted to create universes. You may remember my enthusiasm for the moral law, my Categorical Imperative? It is not diminished. The moral law still holds and always will hold on earth. But I see now it is not an end in itself, only the means to which this power, this freedom is the end.

“That is how and why pain and evil exist in the Absolute. It is obvious that they cannot exist in it as such, being purely relative to states of terrestrial organisms. That is why the comparatively free wills of terrestrial organisms are permitted to create pain and evil.

“When you talk of such things existing in the Absolute, unchanged and unabridged, you are talking nonsense. You are thinking of pain and evil in terms of one dimension of time and three dimensions of space, by which they are indefinitely multiplied.”

“How do you mean—one dimension of time?”

“I mean time taken as linear extension, the pure succession of past, present and future. You think of pain and evil as indefinitely distributed in space and indefinitely repeated in time, whereas in the idea, which is their form of eternity, at their worst they are not many, but one.”

“That doesn’t make them less unbearable,”

“I am not talking about that I am talking about their significance for eternity, or in the Absolute, since you said that was what distressed you.

“You will see this for yourself if you will come with me into the state of three dimensional time.”

“What’s that?” said Mr. Spalding, deeply intrigued. “That,” said the philosopher, “is time which is not linear succession, time which has turned on itself twice to take up the past and future into its present. For as the point is repeated to form the line of space, so the instant is repeated to form the linear time of past, present, future. And as the one-dimensional line turns at right angles to itself to form the two-dimensional plane, so linear or one-dimensional time turns on itself to form two-dimensional or plane time, the past-present, or present-future. And as the plane turns on itself to form the cube, so past-present and present-future double back to meet each other and form cubic time, or past-present-future all together.

“This is the three dimensional state of consciousness we shall have to think ourselves into.”

“Do you mean to say that if we get into it we shall have solved the riddle of the universe?”