A New Era of Thought is a non-fiction

Non-fiction

Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...

 work written by Charles Howard Hinton

Charles Howard Hinton

Charles Howard Hinton was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension, and is known for coining the word tesseract and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of...

, was published in 1888 and reprinted in 1900 by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd., London. A New Era of Thought is about the fourth dimension and its implications on human thinking. It influenced the work of P.D. Ouspensky, particularly his book Tertium Organum where it is frequently quoted. Scientific American

Scientific American

Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...

writer Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature , philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion...

 mentioned this book in some of his articles. A New Era of Thought also had impact on Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of...

's book The Fourth Dimension

The Fourth Dimension (book)

The Fourth Dimension is a non-fiction work written by Rudy Rucker, the Silicon Valley professor of mathematics and computer science, and was published in 1984 by Houghton Mifflin. The book is subtitled as a guided tour of the higher universes. The foreword included is by Martin Gardner, and the...

. It is prefaced by Alicia Boole and H. John Falk. A New Era of Thought is inspired by Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

's allegory of the cave

Allegory of the cave

The Allegory of the Cave—also known as the Analogy of the Cave, Plato's Cave, or the Parable of the Cave—is an allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education"...

 and is influenced by the works of Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....

, Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician and scientist who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics.Sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum...

 and Nikolai Lobachevsky. The book has xvi and 230 pages.

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 tessaract by looking 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.
    • Theory of the Aether.
  • Chapter IX.
    • Another View of the Aether.
    • Material and Aetherial Bodies.
  • Chapter X.
    • Higher Space and Higher Being.
    • Perception and Inspiration.
  • Chapter IX.
    • Space the Scientific Basis of Altruism and Religion.

• Part II
  • Chapter I.
    • Three-space.
    • Genesis of a Cube.
    • Appearances of a Cube to a Plane-being.
  • Chapter II.
    • Further Appearances of a Cube to a Plane-being.
  • Chapter III.
    • Four-space.
    • Genesis of a Tessaract; its Representation in Three-space.
  • Chapter IV.
    • Tessaract moving through Three-space.
    • Models of the Sections.
  • Chapter V.
    • Representation of Three-space by Names and in a Plane.
  • Chapter VI.
    • The Means by which a Plane-being would Acquire a Conception of our Figures.
  • Chapter VII.
    • Four-space: its Representation in Three-space.
  • Chapter VIII.
    • Representation of Four-space by Name.
    • Study of Tessaracts.
  • Chapter IX.
    • Further Study of Tessaracts.
  • Chapter X.
    • Cyclical Projections.
  • Chapter XI.
    • A Tessaractic Figure and its Projections.

Appendices

• A. 100 Names used for Plane Space.
• B. 216 Names used for Cubic Space.
• C. 256 Names used for Tessaractic Space.
• D. List of Colours, Names and Symbols.
• E. A Theorem in Four-Space.
• F. Exercises on Shapes of Three Dimensions.
• G. Exercises on Shapes of Four Dimensions.
• H. Sections of the Tessaract.
• K. Drawings of the Cubic Sides and Sections of the Tessaract (Models 1-12) with Colours and Names.

External links

• Hinton's writings at ibiblio.org contents some abridged passages of the first part of A New Era of Thought.

• At National Library of Australia collection is a pdf of A New Era of Thought available.