TWO:Artistic drawing is addressed to the senses, geometrical drawing is addressed to the understanding. Geometrical drawing may, however, include artistic skill not in the way of ornamentation, but to convey an impression of neatness and completeness, that has by common custom been assumed among engineers, and which conveys to the mind an idea of competent construction in the drawing itself, as well as of the machinery which is represented. Artistic effect, so far as admissible in mechanical drawing, is easy to learn, and should be understood, yet through a desire to make pictures, a beginner is often led to neglect that which is more important in the way of accuracy and arrangement.Returning to our more immediate subject, we must observe that the Pythagoreans did not maintain, in anticipation of modern quantitative science, that all things are determined by number, but that all things are numbers, or are made out of numbers, two propositions not easily distinguished by unpractised thinkers. Numbers, in a word, were to them precisely what water had been to Thales, what air was to Anaximenes, the absolute principle of existence; only with them the idea of a limit, the leading inspiration of Greek thought, had reached a higher degree of abstraction. Number was, as it were, the exterior limit of the finite, and the interior limit of the infinite. Add to this that mathematical studies, cultivated in Egypt and Phoenicia for their practical utility alone, were being pursued in Hellas with ever-increasing ardour for the sake of their own delightfulness, for the intellectual discipline that they supplieda discipline even12 more valuable then than now, and for the insight which they bestowed, or were believed to bestow, into the secret constitution of Nature; and that the more complicated arithmetical operations were habitually conducted with the aid of geometrical diagrams, thus suggesting the possibility of applying a similar treatment to every order of relations. Consider the lively emotions excited among an intelligent people at a time when multiplication and division, squaring and cubing, the rule of three, the construction and equivalence of figures, with all their manifold applications to industry, commerce, fine art, and tactics, were just as strange and wonderful as electrical phenomena are to us; consider also the magical influence still commonly attributed to particular numbers, and the intense eagerness to obtain exact numerical statements, even when they are of no practical value, exhibited by all who are thrown back on primitive ways of living, as, for example, in Alpine travelling, or on board an Atlantic steamer, and we shall cease to wonder that a mere form of thought, a lifeless abstraction, should once have been regarded as the solution of every problem, the cause of all existence; or that these speculations were more than once revived in after ages, and perished only with Greek philosophy itself.
THREE:Their problem was to get above it, to ride it down, force it to take the sea or to come down in a crackup on shore if that must bebefore it could lose itself in that dull, gloomy, lowering bank of fog ahead.
THREE:
THREE:A short distance beyond this little caf lies the large bridge across the Meuse. Before the Germans arrived it was partly destroyed by the Belgians, but so inadequately that obviously the enemy could repair it easily. Bombs were therefore fired regularly from Fort Pontisse at the bridge, and only an hour ago it had been hit, with the result that a big hole was made in the undamaged part. In the road also big holes were made by the exploding projectiles. Having passed underneath the viaduct of the bridge, I found myself opposite Vis on the sloping bank of the Meuse. Two boys had been commanded by the Germans to work the ferry-30boat for them, and after I had shown them my passport, they took me to the other side.CHAPTER I. EARLY GREEK THOUGHT.
