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MYSELF As psychological preparation I shall borrow verbal or alphabetical formulations like O, or zero, or infinity. For some centuries the visual imagery of Euclidean space limited rather than freed thought. Cartesian co-ordinates made, in combination with the theorem of Pythagoras, a possibility of relating points to each other without the visual aids of lines and circles. These visual aids introduced powerful, undetected, forces which distorted the balance of probability. That distortion is still incalculable. Growth, + or –, remains inaccessible to thought, if unmistakable to feeling. Conceptual thought and passionate feeling are impossible to relate within the confines of existent universes of discourse. The problem could be stated by analogy: numbers suffered repeated extensions to carry an increased load – rational numbers, irrational numbers and, latterly, complex conjugate points. In the emotional domain, persecution by passion grows to depression. The relation of the one to the other requires an extension whereby quantity transforms to quality. ‘Very great’, ‘very small’ intervals of time, space, probability, involve quality in a manner analogous to growth from quantity to quality. Thus, quantitative terms such as ‘excessive’, ‘inadequate’, ‘too little’, ‘too much’, may signify a change in kind or quality; conversely, change in quality, for example, love or hate, may imply change in quantity. This is not a crudity such as the difference between one German ‘hating’ and the entire German nation ‘hating’; that may be ‘symptomatic’, ‘significant’ of a method of lateral communication. The change can be formulated in language, music, mathematics; it is, in fact, something ‘infra-’ or ‘ultra-’ human, animate – living or bio-logical. Comparison between animate and inanimate reveals need for discrimination; the ‘Russians’ send a mechanical probe to the moon and retain a
mechanically aided, computer-wise and otherwise, animate being on earth. By contrast, the ‘Am