LWIA 4.3: Charles Howard Hinton/The Fourth Dimension (Patreon)

Perhaps the most interesting moment in “A State of Darkness,” however, is its first page, which consists, after the title, of eight panels worth of what Moore describes in his script as “nice, restful, undemanding blackness,” each adorned with a word balloon. As the issue stretches on it becomes clear that these are snippets of dialogue from throughout the issue, representing various moments of Gull’s life. But one line of dialogue repeats—“‘What is the fourth dimension?’”, a question offered in quotation marks, which appears three times, both opening and closing the reverie.

This turns out to be from an exchange between Gull and his friend, the surgeon James Hinton, in which the latter discusses his son’s theories, which are to be collected in a pamphlet called “What is the Fourth Dimension?” There are, undoubtedly, chronology problems here—Moore sets this scene in 1866, when Hinton’s son, Charles Howard Hinton, was but thirteen—but the pamphlet is a real one, first published in 1884. Indeed, the fourth dimension was a career-long fascination for the younger Hinton, who expanded on the ideas in his 1888 book A New Era of Thought, along with another book in 1904 simply titled The Fourth Dimension. 

The idea did not, however, originate with him. Its earliest explication came in 1754, when Jean le Rond d’Alembert discussed the concept in the Encyclopedie. Over the course of the nineteenth century various mathematicians played with the notion, including August Möbius and Bernard Riemann, who both began pondering the notion of four-dimensional geometries. Its entrance into the popular consciousness, however, took until 1884 not only with Hinton’s pamphlet but with the publication of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which humorously works through how life would work in a two-dimensional world and how a three-dimensional object might appear to the denizens of such a world before musing briefly on the idea of higher dimensions.

Hinton’s pamphlet starts in similar territory, including, in his opening paragraphs, a brief meditation on what life would be like on a two-dimensional plane, noting that while “we think of a plane habitually as having an upper and a lower side, because it is only by the contact of solids that we realize a plane. But a creature which had been confined to a plane during its whole existence would have no idea of there being two sides to the plane he lived on.” But, Hinton argues, such a creature might be able to imagine the idea through reason alone, perhaps by contemplating what it would be like to live on a one-dimensional line. And so Hinton begins addressing the idea only humorously alluded to by Abbott, namely that of how four-dimensional space might work. He spends much of the essay describing the characteristics of what he would come to call a tesseract—a four dimensional shape consisting of eight cubes.

Interestingly, nowhere in Hinton’s essay does he offer the most common answer to his titular question, namely that the fourth dimension is time. It is not that Hinton was unaware of this notion, which dates back to d’Alembert in the 18th century; it’s simply not his focus. Nevertheless, he does approach it obliquely at one point. This comes in the course of a lengthy thought experiment about “a whole system of lines sloping in different directions, but all connected together, and held absolutely still by one framework” that is then passed slowly through a plane, which would give ”the appearance of a multitude of moving points in the plane,” with each of their speeds and directions dependent on the slope of the individual lines. Hinton describes the way in which shapes might briefly form in the plane, imagining “a number of threads to be so grouped as to form a cylinder for some distance, but after a while to be pulled apart by other threads with which they interlink. While the cylinder was passing throught he plane, we should have in the plane a number of points in a circle. When the part where the threads deviated came to the plane, the circle would break up by the points moving away. These moving figures in the plane are but the traces of the shapes of threads as those shapes pass on.” But then he takes a genuinely unexpected turn, declaring that “these moving figures may be conceived to have a life and consciousness of their own.”

Hinton spends only a little time elucidating this remarkable swerve. He extends the idea to the possibility that the shapes themselves might have consciousness, albeit “limited to those parts of the shapes that simultaneously pass through the plane. In the plane, then, we may conceive bodies with all the properties of a material system, moving and changing, possessing consciousness. After a while it may well be that one of them becomes so disassociated that it appears no longer as a unit, and its consciousness as such may be lost. But the threads of existence of sucha  figure are not broken, nor is the shape which gave it origin altered in any way. It has simply passed on to a distance from the plane. Thus nothing which existed in the conscious life on the plane would cease.” He then extrapolates to the idea of a four dimensional object intersecting three-dimensional space, proclaiming that “we should have to imagine some stupendous whole, wherein all that has ever come into being or will come co-exists, which passing slowly on, leaves in this flickering consciousness of ours, limited to a narrow space and a single moment, a tumultuous record of changes and vicissitudes that are but to us.” 

Moore uses this line as an epigraph to “A State of Darkness,” and has the elder Hinton restate it to Gull, describing his son’s theory that “time is a human illusion… that all times co-exist in the stupendous whole of eternity.” Indeed, the line seems to have held some weight for Moore, who cited it to Dave Sim, noting that “unless I’m missing something, this seems to rule out the conventional notion of free will,” and later observed that Hinton’s notion is “very similar to the concept in Jerusalem.” But within From Hell his focus is narrower; he has the elder Hinton describe to Gull the notion of four dimensional patterns that would “seem merely random events” from a three dimensional perspective, using the idea that “something peculiar happens in 1788; a century later related events take place. Then again, 50 years later… then 25 years… then 12 1/2. An invisible curve rising through the centuries.” Moore would eventually unpack the points along this curve in the final installment of From Hell, but in some ways his more important articulation of the notion comes in Gull’s response. “Can history then be said to have an architecture,” he muses. “The notion is most glorious and most horrible.”