On

by Hilaire Belloc

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.

There is another cause for this fear of numbers, and that is their absolute quality. They have no penumbra. You cannot play the fool with words when they refer to numbers as you can in matters where measure is not exact. You cannot combine a part of reality with a part of illusion, which is the very essence of æsthetic enjoyment. Numbers are thus heartless, and the heart loves to ignore them. If your country is losing population but gaining trade you may boycott the population statistics and dwell lovingly upon the trade statistics. But it is more comfortable still to indulge in a vague vision of your country thoroughly prosperous all round and happy. You see this cause of the hatred of numbers coming out very strongly in the case of people who are losing money. Either they stop keeping accounts or they falsify the accounts by hiding sheer loss under some fancy name, such as Goodwill, or Office Furniture, or "Estimated Value." That is an extreme case, but I am sure that in all cases a part of the dislike of numbers comes from this absolute, bullying quality they have.

Nor is it wholly an unreasonable attitude, for the functions of the mind not only include appreciations and creative acts which escape rigid measure, but indeed those acts are the most important.

For instance, the ratio one to the square root of two is the most perfect proportion for the dividing of a window, as with a mullion; for it represents to the eye, and through the eye to the soul, that great principle of the Mean which governs harmony throughout the world. It was a proportion which they loved in the true Middle Ages, and I will show it to you combined with the simple proportions of one to two, one to three, etc., in many and many a window of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, in the time when men were still simple. Nevertheless, an artist may quite justly say that in a particular case this rigid rule would bind him too much. Something in the way the light falls, something in the thickness of the walls, or even in the outlook from the window, makes it fail. It is not to the eye what it is to the measurement upon the plan, and so the artist is perfectly right to say that he will here not be bound by an exact framework of number. It only needs a little exaggeration of such an experience or a little repetition of it to make a weak mind abjure measure in art altogether. And there must have been a lot of that abjuration lately to judge by the funny things one sees.

Numbers also disappoint and annoy in another fashion, which is that men read into them more than they say and then blame the numbers for misleading them.

I had a good deal of experience of that during the last two years of the war. People had got fidgety under the strain, and they did not want to watch the rate of progress made in wearing down the besieged Boche. Sometimes they would angrily deny those numbers altogether. So a man getting into a train for Edinburgh and foolishly expecting it would take him three hours would after, say, the fifth hour get very much annoyed with a companion who should be perpetually pulling out a map and a watch and telling him exactly how far they had come. I remember that this was particularly the case with the rate of German casualty.