Tertium Organum

directly 
owing to the poverty and the weakness of our language. They should not be understood 
literally, just as one cannot understand literally artistic symbols and allegories. One 
should look for their 
hidden meaning,
a meaning which cannot be expressed in words. 
A literal understanding of these symbolic forms in certain trends of modern 
literature, and the fact that they are being associated with the ideas of 'evolution' and 
'morality', taken in the most narrow dualistic sense, completely distorts their inner 
content and deprives them of all significance and value. 
* H. P. Blavatsky, 
Isis Unveiled,
vol. I, J. W. Bonton, New York, 1884, reprinted 
Theosophical Publishing House, 1931. 

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CHAPTER 11 
Science and the problem of the fourth dimension. Paper read by Professor N. A. 
Oumoff at the Mendeleev Convention in 1911, The Characteristic Features and 
Problems of Contemporary Natural-scientific Thought'. New physics. Electro­
magnetic theory. Principles of relativity. The works of Einstein and Minkowsky. 
Simultaneous existence of the past and the future. The eternal Now. Van Manen's 
book on occult experiences. Diagram of a four-dimensional figure. 
Speaking generally about the problems of time, space and higher dimensions, 
expounded in the preceding chapters, it is impossible to avoid dwelling once more on 
the attitude of science to those problems. To many people the attitude of 'exact 
knowledge' to those questions seems a riddle; and yet they are undoubtedly the most 
important of all the questions which at present engage the attention of human thought. 
If it is important, then why does science not speak about it? And why, on the 
contrary, does science go on repeating opposite affirmations, pretending not to know, or 
not to notice, a whole series of theories and hypotheses which have been advanced? 
Science should be the 
investigation of the unknown. 
Why then does it not strive to 
investigate this 
unknown
which has been for so long brought to its notice and which 
very soon will even cease to be unknown? 
To this one can only answer that, unfortunately, only a very small part of official 
academic science undertakes what it should, i.e. to investigate the new and the 
unknown. The greater part of it is merely 
instruction 
in what has long become 
commonplace for independent thought or, still worse, what has long become obsolete 
and discarded as useless. 
Therefore, it is especially gratifying to note that, at times, even in science one may 
detect a tendency towards a quest for new horizons of thought; in other words, that 
academic routine and an obligatory reiteration of an endless number of commonplaces 
have not always and in all cases succeeded in killing love of knowledge and the 
capacity of independent thinking. 
Although very timidly and tentatively, in some of its boldest 

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representatives, 
SCIENCE
, in the last decades has, after all, touched upon 
problems of higher dimensions, and in such cases arrived at results almost 
identical with those expounded in the preceding chapters. 
In December 1911 the Second Mendeleev Convention was opened by a 
paper read by Professor N. A. Oumoff, 
devoted to problems of time and 
higher dimensions,
under the title: The Characteristic Features and Problems 
of Contemporary Natural-scientific Thought'.
Professor N. A. Oumoff's paper, in spite of a certain incomplete-ness, is an 
event of great magnitude in the realm of science and will doubtless be, in 
time, recorded in the history of the development of exact knowledge as an 
unusually bold and outstanding attempt to proclaim, in the citadel of 
positivism which the Mendeleev Convention should have been, new ideas, 
which, in their essence, refute positivism in its entirety.
However, inertia and routine were bound to do their work. Professor N. A. 
Oumoff's paper was heard among a number of other papers, was duly 
published in the proceedings of the Convention and remained there, utterly
failing to produce the effect of a bombshell which it should have done had 
the listeners been more able, and above all more willing, to appreciate its real 
meaning and significance. 
Of course, the weakening of the significance of Professor Oumoff's paper 
was to a great extent due to certain reservations and limitations made by
himself, to the title of the paper, which failed to express its substance, and to 
its general tendency, striving to demonstrate that