Wiskundig bewijs voor wonderen: De literaire verwerking van ‘de vierde dimensie’ door Frederik van Eeden en Felix Ortt (1880-1940)

In the decades around 1900 the mathematical concept of four-dimensional space found its way into many different domains, including art, literature, philosophy and spiritualism. This article discusses the ways two Dutch writers, Frederik van Eeden and Felix Ortt, incorporated the fourth dimension in their work and thereby contributed to the various means by which this concept was disseminated and transformed, including the change from a spatial to a temporal conception of the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension was a typical amalgamation of knowledge in which science, popular science, myths, occultism, art and literature cannot be easily demarcated. Van Eeden and Ortt used the concept to underpin their utopian conviction that in the near future a new era with a better, spiritualized mankind was to come. For these writers, the fourth dimension was one of the scientific notions that showed that our material, three-dimensional world was too limited. This line of reasoning about the limitation of our senses and the existence of miracles was strongly linked to their engagement with spiritualism and parapsychology. Although these cultural phenomena became less influential in the second half of the 20th century, the attraction of the fourth dimension still continues in films, internet, apps and some branches of theoretical physics.