current forms of art expression to render our sense of the eternal
secret heart of things as it presents itself to our young eyes.
Confronted with this difficulty, we have shirked it, and our ambition
has shrunk to the portrayal of those aspects which shuffle our poverty
out of sight. It is not a poverty of technique--we are dexterous
enough; nor is it a poverty of invention--we are clever enough; it is
the poverty of the spiritual bankrupt trying to divert attention by a
prodigal display of the smallest of small change.

Reference is made here only to the arts of space; the arts of
time--music, poetry, and the (written) drama--employing vehicles more
flexible, have been more fortunate, though they too suffer in some
degree from worshipping, instead of the god of order, the god of
chance.

The corrective of this is a return to first principles: principles so
fundamental that they suffer no change, however new and various their
illustrations. These principles are embodied in number, and one might
almost say nowhere else in such perfection. Mathematics is not the
dry and deadly thing that our teaching of it and the uses we put it
to have made it seem. Mathematics is the handwriting on the human
consciousness of the very Spirit of Life itself. Others before
Pythagoras discovered this, and it is the discovery which awaits us
too.

To indicate the way in which mathematics might be made to yield the
elements of a new æsthetic is beyond the province of this essay, being
beyond the compass of its author, but he makes bold to take a single
phase: ornament, and to deal with it from this point of view.