A New era of thought: update

Turns out somebody has also uploaded (about a month ago) a rather ropy copy of this one to archive.org; while generally poorer quality than the images I used, it did contain the page missing in the Australian copy; I have thus been able to complete the reconstruction of this page in the copy on scribd. The editors' introduction to this book slightly glosses over why Hinton left Britain before getting the MSS. into a publishable form. In 1886 he was effectively forced into exile for having unconventional domestic arrangements, after failing to convince the English criminal courts that Maude Weldon and Mary Ellen Boole were simply two different intrusions into our three-dimensional universe of a single four-dimensional being. It is suggested that the cubic-grid climbing frames which you still occasionally see around (where they haven't been torn down on Health and Safety grounds after too many small children getting concussed or losing teeth by banging their heads on the heavy steel pipes of which they're constructed), patented in the 1920s in the USA under the name "Jungle Gym" by one Sebastian Hinton, are based on another of C. H. Hinton's exercises, originally inflicted on his children in the 1880s when he was living in Japan. Tried earlier today to upload J.E. Erdmann's History of Philosophy as page images but Scribd refused to convert the first two volumes, apparently as being too long.

A New Era of Thought

Hinton, Charles Howard: A New Era of Thought. London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1888; reprinted 1900.

Read online at Scribd.

Charles Howard Hinton is probably best remembered for his speculative writings on the subject of the Fourth Dimension. His best-known work on the subject, the repeatedly-reprinted The Fourth Dimension was an early Celephaïs Press e-text (the first to bear the current logo, I believe) and is now on the CP Scribd page for the first time (this release changes the cover to be roughly uniform with other CP editions of Hinton's works but is unchanged as to the text). A New Era of Thought was an earlier treatment of the topic, and is believed to have introduced the word "tesseract" to refer to a four-dimensional hypercube. This book contains the original presentation of the infamous Hinton Cubes, with a system of 81 colours (reduced to 16 in The Fourth Diemsnion) which would make the task of preparing a set an exercise on a par with painting the Vault of the Adepts.

The present copy is based on a set of page images posted on the National Library of Australia, with the exception of the cover scan which was posted on Wikipedia Commons. The NLA scans have been split into single pages (they were originally presented as one page spread of the book to a page of the online copy), deskewed and cleaned up slightly. Unfortunately one page in the last appendix was missing in the copy-text; it will be theoretically possible to reconstruct it from other information in the book, but to do so fully will take some time; in the posted copy, only the easy bits have been done.

CP intends to issue a re-set of this work at some point. Watch this space.

The two collected volumes of Hinton's Scientific Romances, comprising seven essays from around this period plus two slightly later novellas, have also been issued by CP and can be read on Scribd:

First Series
(comprises "What is the Fourth Dimension," "The Persian King," "A Picture of Our Universe," "A Plane World" and "Casting out the Self.")
Second Series
(comprises "The Education of the Imagination," "Many Dimensions," "Stella" and "An Unfinished Communication.")