Number Five

“ An abstract conception is something quite foreign to the essentially primitive mind, as missionaries and explorers have found to their chagrin. The savage can form no mental concept of what civilized man means by such a word as “soul”; nor would his idea of the abstract number 5 be much clearer. When he says five, he uses, in many cases at least, the same word that serves him when he wishes to say hand; and his mental concept when he says five is of a hand. The concrete idea of a closed fist or an open hand with outstretched fingers, is what is upper-most in his mind. ”

“ If the consultant has a lucky number, and this appears with good signs, it promises much success. An unlucky number with gloomy signs predicts misfortune. A journey with a five near obviously points out that it will be taken in five days, or weeks, and so on. Ten dots, close together, means ten pounds or shillings, according to the size and number of the dots. Numbers with the symbol of a legacy show the amount to be expected.
Nun.—This is a sign that you will probably remain unmarried through your own choice; to the married it implies unjust suspicion. ”

“ It thus sometimes happens that a person, man or woman, who was by no means remarkable in life, may have five, or seven, or ten—two fives, for the number must always be unequal—erected in their honour. ”

“ Ten is the farthest number; if half ten
⁠Belongs to each woman, then
⁠Each woman may take half us men;
Or—if this will not serve their turn—since all
Numbers are odd, or even, and they fall
First into five, women may take us all. ”

“ "My dear friend! what is there extraordinary in that? They are all in love with some other man. Who gets the first of a woman's heart? In all my experience I have never yet met with the man who was Number One. Number Two, sometimes. Number Three, Four, Five, often. Number One, never! He exists, of course—but I have not met with him." ”

“ By the slow, and often painful, process incident to the extension and development of any mental conception in a mind wholly unused to abstractions, the savage gropes his way onward in his counting from 1, or more probably from 2, to the various higher numbers required to form his scale. The perception of unity offers no difficulty to his mind, though he is conscious at first of the object itself rather than of any idea of number associated with it. The concept of duality, also, is grasped with perfect readiness. ”

“ That the mind distinguish carefully two ideas, which are different one from another only by the addition or subtraction of one unit : (2) That it retain in memory the names or marks of the several combinations, from an unit to that number ; and that not confusedly, and at random, but in that exact order that the numbers follow one another. In either of which, if it trips, the whole business of numbering will be disturbed, and there will remain only the confused idea of multitude, but the ideas necessary to distinct numeration will not be attained to. ”

“ A fresh mental effort is required of the ignorant child of nature; and the result is “all the fingers and one more,” “both hands and one more,” “one on another count,” or some equivalent circumlocution. If he has an independent word for 10, the result will be simply ten-one. When this step has been taken, the base is established. The savage has, with entire unconsciousness, made all his subsequent progress dependent on the number 10, or, in other words, he has established 10 as the base of his number system. ”

“ But races as fond of metaphor and of linguistic embellishment as are those of the East, or as are our American Indians even, might readily resort to some other source than that furnished by the members of the human body, when in want of a term with which to describe the 5, 10, or any other number of the numeral scale they were unconsciously forming. ”

“ Nothing exists except by Number. Without it, all would be one and the same substance; for Number alone differentiates and qualifies substance. Number is to your Spirit what it is to Matter, an incomprehensible agent. ”

“ Number reveals itself to art by rhythm, which is the beating of the heart of the Infinite. In rhythm, law of order, God is felt. A verse is a gathering like a crowd; its feet take the cadenced step of a legion. Without number, no science; without number, no poetry. The strophe, the epic poem, the drama, the riotous palpitation of man, the bursting forth of love, the irradiation of the imagination, all this cloud with its flashes, the passion,—all is lorded over by the mysterious word number, even as geometry and arithmetic. ”

“ Four, or the tetrad, is the most perfect of numbers and the root of all things. It is holy by nature. Five, or the pentad, is everything; it stops the power of poisons, and is redoubted by evil spirits. ”

“ God, dear pastor, is a Number endowed with motion,—felt, but not seen, the Believer will tell you. Like the Unit, He begins Number, with which He has nothing in common. The existence of Number depends on the Unit, which without being a number engenders Number. God, dear pastor is a glorious Unit who has nothing in common with His creations but who, nevertheless, engenders them. Will you not therefore agree with me that you are just as ignorant of where Number begins and ends as you are of where created Eternity begins and ends? ”

“ Our records include several cases of pronounced emotional association combined with a sort of dramatization of numbers or of colors. Thus, one subject writes, “1,2, 4,7 and 8 are reliable, quiet, well-disposed, but not brilliant numbers; 3 is a sharp, shrewd, noisy and disagreeable number, always making as much trouble as possible. ”

“ We increase numbers by adding one to one, one to two, and so on, without limit, giving a name to 112 each aggregate. The association of ideas which constitutes the process has been already explained. With each number, one, two, three, four, as we go on, the idea of one more is so strongly associated, that we cannot help its existing in immediate conjunction. However high, therefore, we go in numbering, the idea of one more always forces itself upon us ”

“ The symbolism of numbers which greatly engaged the imaginative philosophy of earlier centuries has again acquired a fresh interest from the analytic investigations of Freud and his school. But in the material of number-dreams we no longer discover conscious puzzles of symbolic concatenations of numbers but the unconscious roots of the symbolism of numbers. ”

“ Can a number that is not determinate, that is neither 1, nor 2, nor n, nor n±r, nor any other determinate number, be regarded as being really embodied in the actual world? Can there be in the external world a countless aggregate? ”

“ You have appropriated to yourself a place in the Infinite of Number; you have fitted it to your own proportions by creating (if indeed you did create) arithmetic, the basis on which all things rest, even your societies. Just as Number—the only thing in which your self-styled atheists believe—organized physical creations, so arithmetic, in the employ of Number, organized the moral world. This numeration must be absolute, like all else that is true in itself ”

“ But though the transition from number definitely conceived to number without bounds is like launching into a sea, yet the conception of multitude itself is in one sense susceptible of degree. We may have the idea of a limited, or of an unbounded, multitude. ”

“ With Number One we have never come into personal contact—we know him, as it were, only by the impress of his mind—and in passing, Hastings, I will tell you that I begin to understand that mind very well—a mind most subtle and Oriental—every scheme and plot that we have encountered have emanated from the brain of Li Chang Yen. Number Two and Number Three are so powerful, so high up, that they are for the present immune from our attacks. ”

“ If it should be asked in what manner we must conceive number as subsisting in the intelligible world, we answer, with the great Plotinus, that we must conceive it as subsisting in being itself, with a power of impelling it to the production of multitude. ”

“ Seven, or the heptad, is a number very powerful for good or for evil. It belongs especially to sacred things.
“The number Eight, or the octad, is the first cube, that is to say, squared in all senses, as a die, proceeding from its base two, an even number; so is man four-square, or perfect.
“The number Nine, or the ennead, being the multiple of three, should be regarded as sacred. ”

“ For what else are our ideas of Eternity and Immensity, but the repeated additions of certain ideas of imagined parts of duration and expansion, with the infinity of number ; in which we can come to no end of addition ? For such an inexhaustible stock, number (of all other our ideas) most clearly furnishes us with, as is obvious to every one. For let a man collect into one sum as great a number as he pleases, this multitude, how great soever, lessens not one jot the power of adding to it, or brings him any nearer the end of the inexhaustible stock of number ”

“ Without number they are absolutely incomprehensible to any intelligence. Take away number, that is to say, let the universe and its contents be neither one nor many, and chaos, or worse, is come again. We are involved in contradictory nonsense. Number, then, or form, and not matter, as the Ionic philosophers contended; number, and not the numberless, or ἄπειρον of Anaximander, is the true universal, the common ground, the ultimately real in all things. ”

“ But when the number drawn is a multiple of the one they play, it is a sympathetic number, and is next door to winning; and if the number come reversed,—as if, having played 12, it come out 21,—he laughs with delight. "Eh, don't you see, you stupid fellow," said the speziale of a village one day to a dunce of a contadino, of whose infallible terno not a single number had been drawn,—"Don't you see, in substance all your three numbers have been drawn? and it's shameful in you to be discontented. ”

“ Thus children, either for want of names to mark the several progressions of numbers, or not having yet the faculty to collect scattered ideas into complex ones, and range them in a regular order, and so retain them in their memories, as is necessary to reckoning, do not begin to number very early, nor proceed in it very far or steadily, till a good while after they are well furnished with good store of other ideas : and one may often observe them discourse and reason pretty well, and have very clear conceptions of several other things, before they can tell twenty. ”

“ We feel its power in all our social, domestic, and business relations. The BIRTH NUMBER, on the other hand, acts more directly upon the body, affecting the health of the individual according to the position that it occupies in relation to the NAME NUMBER, and yet, as perfect success or happiness are impossible without health—the three qualities combining to complete the vital trinity—the importance of bringing the two numbers into the closest possible harmony is a fact that must be recognized. ”

“ It also indicates long and healthful life. The name, or 2 through 11, while not in harmony, is sympathetic with the 7, and intensifies its spiritual characteristics. Both 7 and 11 (2) are spiritual numbers, bringing aspirations for the betterment of humanity. The Cornerstone, “A,” being in harmony with the birth number, tends to nullify the material influence of the “D.” The “A” also helps to bring about important changes, not only in the individual life of the bearer, but in the things in which he is most interested. ”

“ But we do not always, when we perceive a thing, observe its negation with respect to others, and consequently do not always perceive number. The idea of number originates in comparison, when we see an object which is not another. ”

“ You believe in Number as the foundation on which rests the edifice of what you call the exact sciences. Without number mathematics are impossible. Well, then, what impossible being, to whom life everlasting should be granted, could ever [Pg 99] finish counting—and in what sufficiently concise language could he utter—the numbers contained in the infinite number of which the existence is demonstrated by your reason. Ask the greatest human genius, and suppose him to sit for a thousand years leaning on a table, his head in his hands, what would he answer? ”

“ This distinction, the distinction by which number is assigned to reason and not to sense, is, I think, an important aid towards understanding the Pythagorean philosophy.
9. Number is a necessary form of thought under which we place or subsume whatever is presented to the mind. Hence form, which is another name for number, and not matter, is the essence of all things, at least of all intelligible things. It is the truth and substance of the universe—its truth and substance, not only in so far as it exists for us, but in so far as it exists for intelligence generally. ”

“ Or if an observer were stationed at a certain point, and 10,000 persons were to pass him in single file without his counting them as they passed, what sort of an estimate would he make of their number? The truth seems to be that our mental conception of number is much more limited than is commonly thought, and that we unconsciously adopt some new unit as a standard of comparison when we wish to render intelligible to our minds any number of considerable magnitude. ”

“ If we compare now the two extremes,—viz., the first attempt at infantine numeration and the highest numerical inventions of the mathematician,—we must recognise the notion of number to be a fine example of the complete evolution of the faculty of abstraction, as applied to a particular case, the principal stages of which we have been able to note in bringing out the ever-increasing importance of signs. ”