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I am so great a lover of and believer in fairy tales that I once organized a society for the dissemination of fairy literature, and at the first meeting of this society we resolved to demand of the board of education to drop mathematics from the curriculum in the public schools and to substitute therefor a four years' course in fairy literature, to be followed, if the pupil desired, by a post-graduate course in demonology and folk-lore.
McCrea had "coached" her son in mathematics, and had been most helpful in securing the appointment. And now here was the quartermaster on leave of absence, the first he had had in years, spending several weeks of his three months' rest at the scene of his own soldier school-days.
There are also exceptional natures that delight in mathematics, minds whose young affections run to angles and logarithms, and with whom the computation of values is itself the chief value in life. The College should accommodate either bias, to the top of its bent, but should not enforce either with compulsory twist. It should not insist on making every alumnus a linguist or a mathematician.
"But I know a way in which a strong personal influence could be kept over even a hundred children; by keeping watch for the sick and sorrowing in their homes, and establishing an intimacy there, and by making a gathering of some sort, say twice a year, or oftener, if a person could, and giving the day to them; and, well, in a hundred different ways that I will not take your time to speak of; only we teachers of day-schools know that we can make our influence far reaching, even when our numbers are large; and we know that there is such an influence in numbers and in disciplined action, that, other things being equal, we can teach mathematics to a class of fifty better than we can to a class of five; and if mathematics, why not the Lord's Prayer?
In those days there was a prejudice against college graduates which prevented their obtaining the highest mercantile positions, and it is doubtful if there was any person connected with the life-insurance companies who could solve a problem in the higher mathematics. The consequence of this was that it placed the presidents quite at the mercy of their own accountants.
Mathematics. . . . A medieval halo clings round this subject which, as a training for the mind, has no more value than whist-playing. I wonder how many excellent public servants have been lost to England because, however accomplished, they lacked the mathematical twist required to pass the standard in this one subject?
But the soul, partaking of mind, reason, and harmony, was not only the work of God, but part of him not only made by him, but begot by him. The first stands for the genus of intelligibles, comprehending in the first subdivision the primitive forms, in the second the mathematics.
The logical conclusion obviously is to discredit all human faculties and to land us in universal scepticism. It was at this point that Kant took up the question, avowedly in consequence of Hume's reasoning. He considered that Hume had been misled by turning his attention to Physics, and that his own good sense would have saved him from his conclusion had he thought rather of Mathematics.
Thus we have one or two modern authors who have installed themselves in sociology by the royal road of romance though even to this branch of learning, as to mathematics, there is no short cut whatsoever, even for those whose pens are naturally skilful authors who tell us that, given this numerical preponderance of women, some kind of polygamous modification of the present marriage system should certainly be adopted.
In classifying our existing Knowledge, then, on our present basis of Scientific acquisition, we must draw a distinct line between Mathematics, Astronomy, and Physics, on the one side, and all remaining departments of Thought, on the other, and set these three Sciences apart as the Exact or Infallible ones, occupying a rank superior to the others, by virtue of the Certainty and Exactitude with which we are able, through the operation of the true Deductive Method, to ascertain their Principles and Phenomena.
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