Note 180 — Chapter V · MAKROKOSMOS

The word dimension ought only to be used in the singular. It means extension but not extensions. The idea of the three directions is an out-and-out abstraction and is not contained in the immediate extension-feeling of the body (the “soul”). Direction as such, the direction-essence, gives rise to the mysterious animal sense of right and left and also the vegetable characteristic of below-to-above, earth to heaven. The latter is a fact felt dream-wise, the former a truth of waking existence to be learned and therefore capable of being transmuted. Both find expression in architecture, to wit, in the symmetry of the plan and the energy of the elevation, and it is only because of this that we specially distinguish in the “architecture” of the space around us the angle of 90° in preference, for example, to that of 60°. Had not this been so, the conventional number of our “dimensions” would have been quite different.