There is a lot more.... Every operation of subtraction, or of the addition of opposite signs, is a mystery; for the conception of the negative in mathematics is a mystery. As for imaginaries, and the dear old root of minus one, you may call it a convention if you like, but it cannot be altogether a convention since it is a necessary basis for arriving at a truth; nor is it a lie, though it certainly dresses up like one. Its name is _iota_ and I loved it long ago. One might quote of this formidable being what I think St. Augustine said of some Bible-story:
You may tell me that by far the greater part of men are not concerned with these ultimate far goals of bewilderment and of despair to which the science of numbers will lead them out of their happy homes. I am not so sure. Nowadays when people are so fond of the word "sub-conscious" (and I have myself worked the animal as hard as was possible on meagre rations) we may drag it in here without extravagance. There is, I think, an instinct in men the least acquainted with mathematics that it is possible to push them too far; and though men begin to tremble long before the limits of human reason are reached--in fact, as a rule, they get the wind up before they reach the Calculi--yet a god tells them in what direction they are going, and warns them that too much curiosity is ill for man.
If you were to seek for the most irrational of all appetites, the one appetite for which you could not give any sort of reason, you would find it to be the strongest appetite of all: the appetite for posthumous fame.
Milton made a little fortune (in the literary sense of that word--and my fellow-hacks will know what sort of fortune _that_ is) by calling it the last infirmity of noble minds. It is a very true saying, not only in its direct sense but in its implication. It is not only true that men who have conquered every other appetite hardly conquer this one; it is also true that there is something divine about the desire for fame, infirmity though it be. The mind remains well noble though still fully possessed of such a desire.
But explain the love of fame you cannot. It would be explicable if there were implanted in the mind of man everywhere and at all times a certitude, as strong as our certitude of the universe about us, that the individual soul survived death with a full, conscious, and continuous memory, _and_, on the top of that, would be more interested in what was going on here than in what was going on in its own place. No such certitude has been granted to man. On the contrary, those who hold the doctrine of immortality hold it as a special revelation and defend it perilously. The mass of men have been very vague or sceptical or negative about the whole affair. And as to the second part of the proposition, the idea that, even granted this personal, conscious and continuous survival, the soul would be more interested in things happening here on earth than in the things of its own place, no one has ever dreamt or could dream of saying anything so absurd. The farthest to which St. Augustine went (and he went as far as anybody) was to say that the soul, however blessed, retained the great human affections: men hope that this is true, though it is hardly doctrine. But neither St. Augustine nor any one else (that I know of) ever pretended that the damned or beatified soul was worrying about what Smith, Jones and Robinson thought about some verse it had produced, or was chagrined by their neglect--after it had got rid of the limitations of this world. Why, one does not even bother at fifty about what people may be saying of one's work at twenty-five. Most of us would rather it were forgotten, and some of us actually suppress it at great expense: buying up the first edition and leaving strict injunctions in our wills that any immature stuff shall not be reprinted after our death.