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Truth to say, the theory of intelligence in the animal would be
so extraordinary as to be almost untenable. If we are determined,
at whatever cost, to pin our faith to it, we are bound to call in
the aid of other ideas, to appeal, for instance, to the extremely
mysterious and essentially uncomprehended and incomprehensible
nature of numbers. It is almost certain that the science of
mathematics lies outside the intelligence. It forms a mechanical
and abstract whole, more spiritual than material and more
material than spiritual, visible only through its shadow and yet
constituting the most immovable of the realities that govern the
universe. From first to last it declares itself a very strange
force and, as it were, the sovereign of another element than that
which nourishes our brain. Secret, indifferent, imperious and
implacable, it subjugates and oppresses us from a great height or
a great depth, in any case, from very far, without telling us
why. One might say that figures place those who handle them in a
special condition. They draw the cabalistic circle around their
victim. Henceforth, he is no longer his own master, he renounces
his liberty, he is literally "possessed" by the powers which he
invokes. He is dragged he knows not whither, into a formless,
boundless immensity, subject to laws that have nothing human
about them, in which each of those lively and tyrannical little
signs which move and dance in their thousands under the pen
represents nameless, but eternal, invincible and inevitable
verities.
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