58 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
can always be reduced to "One"; and "One" itself is no 
better , because, among other things, it finds itself forced to 
deny the very premises on which it was founded . 
Shall we be any better off if we assume that Ex nihilo nihil 
fit is a falsehood , that the origin of All Things is Nothing? 
Let us see! 
O. Shall we first glance at the mathematical aspect of 
Nothing? (Including its identical equation in Logic.) This I 
worked out so long ago as 1902 e.g. in Berashith, which you 
will find reprinted in The Sword of Song, and in my 
Collected Works, Vol. I. 
The argument may be summarized as follows. 
When, in the ordinary way of business, we write 0, we 
should really write on. For 0 implies that the subject is not 
extended in any dimension under discussion. Thus a line may 
be two feet in length, but in breadth and depth the 
coefficient is Zero. We could describe it as 2f+Ob+Od, or 
n2f+Ob+Od. 
What I proposed in considering "What do we mean by 
Nothing?" was to consider every possible quality of any 
object as a dimension . 
For instance, one might describe this page as being 
nf + n'b + n"d + 0 redness + 0 amiability + 0 velocity + 0 
potential and so on, until you had noted and measured all the 
qualities it possesses, and excluded all that it does not . For 
convenience, 
we may write 
this expression 
as 
Xf+b+d+r+a+v+p -using the initials of the qualities which we 
call dimensions. 
Just one further explanation in pure mathematics . To 
interpret Xl, Xl + I 
or X2 , and so on, we assume the 
reference to be to spatial dimensions. Thus suppose Xl to be 
a line a foot long, X2 will be a plane a foot square, and X3 a 
cube measuring a foot in each dimension. But what about 
X4 ? There 
are no more spatial dimensions. Modem 
mathematics has (unfortunately, I think) agreed to consider 
this fourth dimension as time. Well, and XS? To interpret this 
expression , we may begin to consider other qualities, such as