A New Era of Thought

A New Era of Thought is a non-fiction work written by Charles Howard Hinton, 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 writer Martin Gardner, who mentioned this book in some of his articles, and influenced Rudy Rucker's The Fourth Dimension. It is prefaced by Alicia Boole and H. John Falk. A New Era of Thought is inspired by Plato's allegory of the cave and is influenced by the works of Immanuel Kant, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Nikolai Lobachevsky. The book has xvi and 230 pages.

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 at 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.

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