Magick Without Tears

WOOLLY POMPOSITIES 103 secret-peddlers, the U.B., the O.H.M., the A.M.O.R.C., and all the other gangs of self-styled Rosicrucians; they should be hissed off the stage. Now that we are agreed upon the conditions to be satisfied if we are to allow that a given proposition contains a Thought at all, it is proper to tum our attention to the relative value of different kinds of thought. This question is of the very first importance : the whole theory of Education depends upon a correct standard. There are facts and facts: one would not necessarily be much the wiser if one got the Encyclopaedia Britannica by heart, or the Tables of Logarithms. The one aim of Mathematics, in fact-Whitehead points this out in his little Shilling Arithmetic-is to make one fact do the work of thousands. What we are looking for is a working Hierarchy of Facts. That takes us back at once to our original "addition and subtraction " remark in my letter on Mind. Classification, the first step, proceeds by putting similar things together, and dissimilar things apart. One asset in the Audit of a fact is the amount of knowledge which it covers. (2 + 5)2 = 49; (3 + 4)2 = 49; (6 + 2)2 = 64; (7 + 1)2 = 64; (9 + 4)2 = 169 are isolated facts, no more; worse, the coincidences of 49 and 64 might start the wildest phantasies in your head-"something mysterious about this." But if you write: the sum of the squares of any two numbers is the sum of the square of each plus twice their multiple-(a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2 -you have got a fact which covers every possible case, and exhibits one aspect of the nature of numbers themselves. The importance of a word increases as its rank, from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract. (It is curious that the highest values of all, the "Laws of Nature, " are never exactly 'true' for any two persons, for one person can never observe the identical phenomena sensible to another, since two people cannot be in exactly the same place at exactly the same time: yet it is just these facts that are equally true for all men.) Observe, I pray, the paramount importance of memory .