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To give to his material the semblance of the body beautiful is the technical problem of the sculptor. Although this semblance is primarily for sight, it is not exclusively so. For in sculpture shape is not two-dimensional, but plastic; and for the full appreciation of plasticity, the cooperation of touch is required.

You've had descriptive geometry, of course, and so know that a shadow, being simply a projection of a material object upon a plane, is a two-dimensional thing or rather, a two-dimensional concept. Now take the shade, which is, of course, this entire figure here, between the cylinder casting the shadow and the plane of projection.

Imagine a being free of a three-dimensional world trying to converse with a being still limited to a two-dimensional world, and we have a clew to what I think may have happened after the crucifixion of Jesus. The three-dimensional body would behave in a manner altogether unaccountable to the two-dimensional watcher.

The latter, knowing only length and breadth, and nothing of up or down, would see his three-dimensional friend as a line only. The moment the three-dimensional solid rose above or sank below his line of vision, it would seem to have disappeared like an apparition, although as really present as before. To the two-dimensional mind it would seem as though the solid were a ghost.

We can say that nature seen through Bacon's eyes appears as if painted on a two-dimensional surface, so that all its facts are seen alongside each other at exactly the same distance from the observer.

* This is intelligible without calculation but only for the two-dimensional case if we revert once more to the case of the disc on the surface of the sphere. In this way, by using as stepping-stones the practice in thinking and visualisation which Euclidean geometry gives us, we have acquired a mental picture of spherical geometry.

The sphere of the senses is two-dimensional: except for the slight aid afforded by binocular vision, sight gives us moving pictures on a plane, and touch contacts surfaces only. What circumstances, we may ask, have compelled our intellect to conceive of solid space?

The unification of line in sculpture is a matter not only of lines within the whole and of single contours, but of the total visual form of the whole, of silhouette. Although three-dimensional, every statue casts a two-dimensional image on the retina. It makes as many of these plane pictures as there are points of view from which it can be seen.

For this purpose we will first give our attention once more to the geometry of two-dimensional spherical surfaces. In the adjoining figure let K be the spherical surface, touched at S by a plane, E, which, for facility of presentation, is shown in the drawing as a bounded surface. Let L be a disc on the spherical surface.

What is here meant by the number of dimensions, I think I may assume to be known. Now we take an example of a two-dimensional continuum which is finite, but unbounded. We imagine the surface of a large globe and a quantity of small paper discs, all of the same size. We place one of the discs anywhere on the surface of the globe.