Читать книгу The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity онлайн

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For, in the first place, what do you mean by “one,” “two,” and “three”? I have never had any experience of such things; nor have you; nor can you. “Two” oranges, “two” apples, and the like, we have had experience of, and can realize; but to think of “one” or “two” by themselves (“one” or “two” with “anythings”, or with “nothings” after them), “one” or “two” as “abstract ideas”—this really is a most difficult or rather (I am inclined to say) an impossible task. When I say “one” and “two,” I think I see before me dimly “one” or “two” dots or small strokes, and I perceive that two and one of these dots or strokes make up three dots or strokes. When I speak of “twenty” and “thirty,” I do not see any images of these existences; and when I say that “twenty” and “thirty” make “fifty,” I do not realize the process of addition at all visibly; I merely repeat the statement on the authority of previous observations and reasonings mostly made by others and not by myself. But so far as I approximate to the realization of an abstract number, I do it by a kind of negative imagination. And in any case we can hardly deny that all arithmetical propositions, since they employ terms that denote mere imaginary ideas, must be regarded as based on the imagination.