s.
For the furniture fitted in bit by bit and better and better;
and the bedroom seemed to grow more and more solid.
The man recognised the portrait of himself over the mantelpiece or
the medicine bottles on the table, like the dying lover in Browning.
In other words, science so far had steadily solidified things;
Newton had measured the walls and ceiling and made a calculus
of their three dimensions. Darwin was already arranging
the animals in rank as neatly as a row of chairs, or Faraday
the chemical elements as clearly as a row of medicine bottles.
From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth,
science was not only making discoveries, but all the discoveries
were in one direction. Science is still making discoveries;
but they are in the opposite direction.

For things are rather different when the man in the bed
next looks at the bedroom. Not only is the rose-bush still
very obvious; but the other things are looking very odd.
The perspective seems to have gone crooked; the walls seem to vary
in measurement till the man thinks he is going mad. The wall-paper
has a new pattern, of strange spirals instead of round dots.
The table seems to have moved by itself across the room and thrown
the medicine bottles out of the window. The telephone has vanished
from the wall; the mirror does not reflect what is in front of it.
The portrait of himself over the mantelpiece has a face that is
not his own.

That is something like a vision of the vital change in the whole
trend of natural philosophy in the last twenty or thirty years.
It matters little whether we regard it as the deepening
or the destruction of the scientific universe.
It matters little whether we say that grander abysses have
opened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it.
It is quite self-evident that scientific men are at war with wilder
and more unfathomable fancies than the facts of the age of Huxley.
I attempt no controversy about any of the particular cases:
it is the cumulative effect of all of them that makes the impression
one of common sense. It is really true that the perspective and
dimensions of the man's bedroom have altered; the disciples of Einstein
will tell him that straight lines are curved and perhaps measure
more one way than the other; if that is not a nightmare, what is?
It is really true that the clock has altered, for time has turned
into the fourth dimension or something entirely different