[...]... movement in later years Satire often proves to be a slippery weapon Apparently some of the readers of Flatland s first edition failed to grasp the irony that Abbott intended to aim at the Square for his whole-hearted endorsement of the ruthless and dismissive attitudes of the aristocracy toward the lower classes (an error also made by many readers of Jonathan Swift’s satiric essay A Modest Proposal’) In... as that represented by John Henry Newman’s orthodoxy about miracles and church dogma.15 For Abbott, the glory of Christianity was that the constant challenge of illusion had kept faith from degenerating into a new enslavement to law Seen in the light of such views, Flatland can also be read as an allegory aimed at correcting the arrogance of both the materialist intellect and dogmatic faith and at demonstrating... gravity As early as the 1850s, German mathematician Bernhard Riemann had challenged the adequacy of Euclidean axioms by positing the possibility of a fourth and higher dimensions, and had argued that the warping of our three-dimensional world into a higher dimensional space could explain forces like gravity, electricity, and magnetism British mathematician W K Clifford, who made Riemann’s work available... education and culture once open only to the gentry and aristocracy It is significant, however, that the ‘Law of Nature’ (p 21) in Flatland that allows each male child to gain one more side than his father and hence to advance with each generation toward the polygonal status of the nobility sanctions a form of social progress that is automatic only for the professional or gentlemanly squares and higher ranks... Imagination, and Belief The fact that Abbott labels the male vocabulary of calculation and self-interest part of the ‘idiom of Science’ (p 65) points to the more serious intellectual goals of this deceptively light-hearted work Flatland participated in a debate about the limits of human knowledge that embraced science, mathematics, and religion in the second half of the nineteenth century A range of. .. conceivable reality And yet this leap of faith does not invalidate the Square’s experiences, since for Abbott, geometrical truth depends on the same acts of imagination as do other forms of human understanding and indeed formed a model for it As his hypothetical geometer argues in The Kernel and the Husk, no ‘chalkland’ triangle was exactly equilateral, no chalkland point literally of one dimension Although... practice of faith, hope, and love can make us better people Abbott considered spiritualists to be as wrongheaded as Christian fundamentalists for insisting on too literal a proof of the supernatural Like the Square, who initially assumes that the Sphere must be a deity because of what appear to be his supernatural powers, both groups mistakenly assumed that phenomena that they could not (yet) explain... the rational and the spiritual The key to his solution of this dilemma lay in the imagination, the same kind of imagination that allows the Square ultimately to escape the limits of his own perceptions and to recognize the possibility of higher realities Imagination played a pivotal if slippery role in various Victorian debates about the limits and possibilities of human understanding The hallmark of. .. understanding higher dimensional geometries that Flatland investigates occupied a central position in Victorian debates about the accessibility of absolute truth As Joan Richards has demonstrated, geometry served as the ‘queen of the sciences’16 in the nineteenth century and was central to debates over the nature of human knowledge Euclid’s famous mathematical treatise Elements had traditionally formed... material evidence Humanity’s struggle to interpret natural phenomena in primitive times had required constant leaps of the imagination that providentially prepared them for their eventual reception of the truths of Christianity By thus positing imagination as the basis of all knowledge, Abbott sanctioned a religion independent of material proof: there was no need to require violations of physical laws—miracles . Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain. grammar and rhetoric, including A Shake- spearean Grammar (1869), as well as studies of the life and work of Francis Bacon. As an ordained Anglican priest, he adopted a liberal or ‘Broad Church’ approach. influ- ence on Flatland. K. G. Valente proposes an alternative origin for Flatland, as Abbott’s rebuttal of an 1877 article in the City of London School Magazine that advocated too direct a correspondence