Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought

Ouspensky's most ambitious early work, written before his encounter with Gurdjieff, presenting a systematic philosophical investigation into the nature of space, time, and consciousness. Beginning from Kant's epistemology and proceeding through geometry, physics, and the psychology of perception, Ouspensky argues that the three-dimensional world is a function of our limited perceiving apparatus, and that a fourth dimension — corresponding to time experienced as space — is accessible to higher forms of consciousness. The book draws on Hinton's work on the fourth dimension, Riemann's geometry, and the new physics of Einstein and Minkowski. The title places the work in succession to Aristotle's Organon and Bacon's Novum Organum, proposing a third canon of thought adequate to the perception of higher reality. Ouspensky traces the evolution of space-sense from one-dimensional beings through animals to man, arguing that what we call time is a dim apprehension of a higher spatial dimension, and that mystical and cosmic consciousness represent genuine expansions of the perceiving apparatus into that dimension. Widely regarded as one of the most original works of early twentieth-century metaphysics.