Note 189 — Chapter V · MAKROKOSMOS

This zero, which probably contains a suggestion of the Indian idea of extension—of that spatiality of the world that is treated in the Upanishads and is entirely alien to our space-consciousness—was of course wholly absent in the Classical. By way of the Arabian mathematics (which completely transformed its meaning) it reached the West, where it was only introduced in 1554 by Stipel, with its sense, moreover, again fundamentally changed, for it became the mean of +1 and -1 as a cut in a linear continuum, i.e., it was assimilated to the Western number-world in a wholly un-Indian sense of relation.