Note 7 — Chapter II

It would be interesting to learn where Wells happened to get hold of the idea that time is the fourth dimension of reality and how much he knew then of the history of the conception. He could not, at any rate, for all his prophetic powers, have foreseen the important part it was to play in scientific thought and metaphysical speculation in the coming century. Lorentz, Einstein and Minkowski have incorporated it into their new theory of relativity which threatens to abolish the ether and to make mass a variable, dependent on velocity. Our ordinary Euclidean or three dimensional space would thus be a cross-section at a certain time. (See "The Time-Space Manifold of Relativity", by Edwin B. Wilson and G. N. Lewis, in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, November, 1912.) Heinrich Czolbe in 1875 brought forward the theory (see Müller, Archiv für systematische Philosophie, XVII, p. 106), and Lotze discusses it in his "Microcosmos." Bergson's philosophy is based upon the distinction he draws between psychological duration and the physical treatment of time as a kind of space. Professor Pitkin of Columbia criticizes Wells's time-machine from the metaphysical standpoint in "Time and Pure Activity" (Journal Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. ii, No. 19).