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Updated: June 22, 2025
After a certain time of life, and long before a man grows old, it is the fashion thus to make one's bow. Language. A man's personal equation, as astronomers call the effect of his individuality, is kin, for all its complexity, to those simple algebraical problems which so puzzled us at school. To solve either we must begin by knowing the values of the constants that enter into its expression.
For two days Mr Rip and myself were not upon speaking terms. On the third day, a Master Barnard brings me up a slate-full of plusses, minusses, x, y, z's, and other letters of the alphabet, in a most amiable algebraical confusion. "Take it to Mr Riprapton," said I. The lad took it, and the mathematical master looked over it with a perplexed gravity, truly edifying.
Reason is slow and abstract, cold and speculative; but man is a being of feeling and action; he is not resolvable into a dictum de omni et nullo, or a series of hypotheticals, or a critical diatribe, or an algebraical equation.
I went down to the saloon, but found no one there. I ventured to knock at the door that opened into the Captain's room. "Come in," was the answer. I entered, and found Captain Nemo deep in algebraical calculations of x and other quantities. "I am disturbing you," said I, for courtesy's sake.
They abstained from animal food with the abhorrence of Pythagoreans, their drink was a pure simple element, they were vomited once a week, took physic or a glyster every third day, spent the forenoon in algebraical calculations, and slept from four o'clock till midnight, that they might then take the field with that cool serenity which is the effect of refreshment and repose.
The bookmaker does not need to visit a racecourse; he is required to work out a sort of algebraical problem on each race, and, by exercising a little shrewdness, he may leave himself a small balance on every event.
As soon as we conceive a thing divided into equal parts, without knowing into what number of parts, we may call it a or x, and apply to it, without danger of error, every algebraical formula in the books.
"What do you think of it?" I asked. "It seems very complete and conclusive," she replied. And then, with a sigh, she murmured: "Poor old Uncle John! How horrid it sounds to talk of him in this cold-blooded, business-like way, as 'the testator, as if he were nothing but a sort of algebraical sign."
The handwriting corresponded with that of the papers already received; the blackboard was covered with algebraical symbols traced in chalk, which they were careful not to obliterate; and the papers, which consisted for the most part of detached scraps, presented a perfect wilderness of geometrical figures, conic sections of every variety being repeated in countless profusion.
The words, then, in which they are set forth are not language, speech, literature, but rather, as I have said, symbols. And, as a proof of it, you will recollect that it is possible, nay usual, to set forth the propositions of Euclid in algebraical notation, which, as all would admit, has nothing to do with literature.
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