Note 414 — Chapter IX · SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

The thrill of big figures is a feeling peculiar to Western mankind. In the Civilization of to-day this significant passion for gigantic sums, for indefinitely big and indefinitely minute measurements, for “records” and statistics, is playing a conspicuous part.

(Our very notation of number is ceasing to rest on sense-standards. Science has carried number, as ordinarily written, so high and so low that it now uses a movable base for its numerical statements. For example, a number in astronomy is written, not as 3,450,000,000 but as 3.45 × 10⁹, one relating to ordinary experience as 3.45 (i.e., 3.45 × 10⁰) and one in electromagnetic theory, not as 0.00000345 but as 3.45 × 10^-6. Under this system the conceptual unit may be as large or as small, compared with the unit of daily experience, as the region of thought in which the calculation is taking place requires. And different conceptual worlds can be connected as to number [say, a number of kilometres brought into an order of thought that deals with millimetres] by simply changing the ten-power.—Tr.)