The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development by Levi Leonard Conant
page 64 of 286 (22%)
page 64 of 286 (22%)
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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. He knows no more and cares no more about the pure number 5 than he does about the law of the conservation of energy. He sees in his mental picture only the real, material image, and his only comprehension of the number is, "these objects are as many as the fingers on my hand." Then, in the lapse of the long interval of centuries which intervene between lowest barbarism and highest civilization, the abstract and the concrete become slowly dissociated, the one from the other. First the actual hand picture fades away, and the number is recognized without the original assistance furnished by the derivation of the word. But the number is still for a long time a certain number _of objects_, and not an independent concept. It is only when the savage ceases to be wholly an animal, and becomes a thinking human being, that number in the abstract can come within the grasp of his mind. It is at this point that mere reckoning ceases, and arithmetic begins. CHAPTER IV. THE ORIGIN OF NUMBER WORDS. (_CONTINUED_.) 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 |
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