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22
WAR AND THE

doubt; but how are you to make him confess that he is wrong? Nay; leaving the arts, a whole council of wranglers could not convince me of the simplest proposition connected with sines, cosines, and tangents. Here is the mistress of all the sciences; the nearest approximation to necessary and absolute truth which the human mind can conceive; yet you must spend years of hard study and strong effort before you can begin to understand what its simplest statements signify. And those sines and things apart; there are statements on the first page of Euclid that seem to me as difficult as anything in the creed of St. Athanasius. It is written that no man hath seen God at any time; but has any man seen a Point or a Line or a Plane Surface at any time? A Point has neither parts nor magnitude—I seem to remember