In a still more obscure passage he now desires to disavow the
Circular or aristocratic tendencies with which some critics have
naturally credited him. While doing justice to the intellectual power
with which a few Circles have for many generations maintained their
supremacy over immense multitudes of their countrymen, he believes
that the facts of Flatland, speaking for themselves without comment on
his part, declare that Revolutions cannot always be suppressed by
slaughter, and that Nature, in sentencing the Circles to infecundity,
has condemned them to ultimate failure -- "and herein," he says, "I
see a fulfilment of the great Law of all worlds, that while the wisdom
of Man thinks it is working one thing, the wisdom of Nature constrains
it to work another, and quite a different and far better thing." For
the rest, he begs his readers not to suppose that every minute detail
in the daily life of Flatland must needs correspond to some other
detail in Spaceland; and yet he hopes that, taken as a whole, his work
may prove suggestive as well as amusing, to those Spacelanders of
moderate and modestminds who -- speaking of that which is of the
highest importance, but lies beyond experience -- decline to say on
the one hand, "This can never be," and on the other hand, "It must
needs be precisely thus, and we know all about it.
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