X
THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY
THE poet Longfellow—or was it Confucius, the inventor of wisdom?—remarked:
And things are not what they seem.”
As mathematics are—or is: thanks, old subscriber!—the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures—unassailable sums in addition—shall be set over against whatever opposing element there may be.
A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would say: “Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that X plus—that is, that life is real—then things (all of which life includes) are real. Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the proposition that ‘things are not what they seem,’ why—”
But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we would conduct you into the presence
