You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are gifted with two eyes,
endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of various
colours, you, who can actually SEE an angle, and contemplate the complete
circumference of a circle in the happy region of the Three Dimensions -- how shall I
make clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing
one another's configuration?
Recall what I told you above. All beings in Flatland, animate or inanimate, no matter
what their form, present TO OUR VIEW the same, or nearly the same, appearance, viz.
that of a straight Line. How then can one be distinguished from another, where all appear
the same?
The answer is threefold. The first means of recognition is the sense of hearing; which
with us is far more highly developed than with you, and which enables us not only to
distinguish by the voice our personal friends, but even to discriminate between different
classes, at least so far as concerns the three lowest orders, the Equilateral, the Square, and
the Pentagon -- for of the Isosceles I take no account. But as we ascend in the social
scale, the process of discriminating and being discriminated by hearing increases in
difficulty, partly because voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of voice-
discrimination is a plebeian virtue not much developed among the Aristocracy. And
wherever there is any danger of imposture we cannot trust to this method. Amongst our
lowest orders, the vocal organs are developed to a degree more than correspondent with
those of hearing, so that an Isosceles can easily feign the voice of a Polygon, and, with
some training, that of a Circle himself. A second method is therefore more commonly
resorted to.
FEELING is, among our Women and lower classes -- about our upper classes I shall
speak presently -- the principal test of recognition, at all events between strangers, and
when the question is, not as to the individual, but as to the class. What therefore
"introduction" is among the higher classes in Spaceland, that the process of "feeling" is
with us. "Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend Mr. So-and-so" -- is still,
among the more old-fashioned of our country gentlemen in districts remote from towns,
the customary formula for a Flatland introduction. But in the towns, and among men of
business, the words "be felt by" are omitted and the sentence is abbreviated to, "Let me
ask you to feel Mr. So-and-so"; although it is assumed, of course, that the "feeling" is to
be reciprocal. Among our still more modern and dashing young gentlemen -- who are
extremely averse to superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of their
native language -- the formula is still further curtailed by the use of "to feel" in a
technical sense, meaning, "to recommend-for-the-purposes-of-feeling-and-being-felt";
and at this moment the "slang" of polite or fast society in the upper classes sanctions such
a barbarism as "Mr. Smith, permit me to feel Mr. Jones."
