Now when one learns a thing like that early in life, when one early discovers that a thing apparently ridiculous is quite common, the mind sets to work at once to try and find out an explanation. For a very long time I could pretend to none, but I think I am at last beginning to see my way in the matter and to grasp why it is that so many people avoid the prime measure of reality.
On the face of it one would say that the thing was impossible, for one can do nothing without numbers. The human life is distinguished from the bestial chiefly by the use and knowledge of numbers. Which reminds me that I once went to see in Berlin a horse of which it was said by its owner that it could count up to ten. This was before the war. I do not know what may have happened since. It was all nonsense; the horse could not count up to ten. What it could do was to move its foot round, tapping it along a row of large numbers, and when it got to the number which the owner wanted it to indicate he spoke to the horse and the horse stopped moving. But to return from Berlin.
Everything done by a human being all day long, even sleeping, is based upon numbers: all his observation and all his action. To be the enemy of numbers is like being the enemy of the air one breathes or of the necessity of human speech. Why, then, is it that this enmity arises, or at any rate has arisen to-day, rather late perhaps in modern history, and especially here in England?
I think it is due to the convergence of a great number of tendencies.
In the first place, numbers always involve _some_ act of thought, just as progress always involves _some_ action of the body. And people fight shy of numbers just as they tend to fight shy of exertion. If you have four people to dinner, and you ask three more, that makes seven. It is quite a little sum, and may be compared to the exertion of crossing a room. Still, very often one does not like even to cross the room, but prefers sitting in one's chair to getting up to take a book.
If you are rich enough to be overdrawn at the bank, and then lucky enough to get a sum of money larger than your overdraft, and then honest enough to pay it in, it is your duty to make a little calculation on the back of the counterfoil, turning a minus into a plus, and you have to carry pence into shillings and shillings into pounds. It is quite a little exertion, like going up a flight of stairs.... I fancy that more than half the people who have bank accounts shirk that duty. Yet it is a plain duty, for if you do not know your balance at the bank you may inadvertently smash a stumer, _si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi_.