THREE:Not till now did Gordon Bruce fully appreciate the blow that a cruel fate had dealt him. At first he had been confused and bewildered, and a little disposed to doubt the evidence of his senses. There was a vague hope that it was a trick, a mistake that a moment would rectify.Returning to our more immediate subject, we must observe that the Pythagoreans did not maintain, in anticipation of modern quantitative science, that all things are determined by number, but that all things are numbers, or are made out of numbers, two propositions not easily distinguished by unpractised thinkers. Numbers, in a word, were to them precisely what water had been to Thales, what air was to Anaximenes, the absolute principle of existence; only with them the idea of a limit, the leading inspiration of Greek thought, had reached a higher degree of abstraction. Number was, as it were, the exterior limit of the finite, and the interior limit of the infinite. Add to this that mathematical studies, cultivated in Egypt and Phoenicia for their practical utility alone, were being pursued in Hellas with ever-increasing ardour for the sake of their own delightfulness, for the intellectual discipline that they supplied��a discipline even12 more valuable then than now, and for the insight which they bestowed, or were believed to bestow, into the secret constitution of Nature; and that the more complicated arithmetical operations were habitually conducted with the aid of geometrical diagrams, thus suggesting the possibility of applying a similar treatment to every order of relations. Consider the lively emotions excited among an intelligent people at a time when multiplication and division, squaring and cubing, the rule of three, the construction and equivalence of figures, with all their manifold applications to industry, commerce, fine art, and tactics, were just as strange and wonderful as electrical phenomena are to us; consider also the magical influence still commonly attributed to particular numbers, and the intense eagerness to obtain exact numerical statements, even when they are of no practical value, exhibited by all who are thrown back on primitive ways of living, as, for example, in Alpine travelling, or on board an Atlantic steamer, and we shall cease to wonder that a mere form of thought, a lifeless abstraction, should once have been regarded as the solution of every problem, the cause of all existence; or that these speculations were more than once revived in after ages, and perished only with Greek philosophy itself.
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THREE:But even the most perfect mastery of Greek would not284 have made Plotinus a successful writer. We are told that before taking up the pen he had thoroughly thought out his whole subject; but this is not the impression produced by a perusal of the Enneads. On the contrary, he seems to be thinking as he goes along, and to be continually beset by difficulties which he has not foreseen. The frequent and disorderly interruptions by which his lectures were at one time disturbed seem to have made their way into his solitary meditations, breaking or tangling the thread of systematic exposition at every turn. Irrelevant questions are constantly intruding themselves, to be met by equally irrelevant answers. The first mode of expressing an idea is frequently withdrawn, and another put in its place, which is, in most cases, the less intelligible of the two; while, as a general rule, when we want to know what a thing is, Plotinus informs us with indefatigable prolixity what it is not.Tangent wheels and spiral gearing have only what is termed line contact between the bearing surfaces, and as the action between these surfaces is a sliding one, such wheels are subject to rapid wear, and are incapable of sustaining much pressure, or transmitting a great amount of power, except the surfaces be hard and lubrication constant. In machinery the use of tangent wheels is mainly to secure a rapid change of speed, usually to diminish motion and increase force.
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THREE:A long time after I had left Belgium I got hold of the Black List, in which I am mentioned twice over among eighty-seven other persons; once as Hokveld-Journalist and again as Mokveld-Correspondent. The list was published by me in De Tijd of June 2nd, 1915.
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THREE:Far behind them in their swift chase, with every ounce of power put into their engine and their whole hearts urging it to better speed, the Sky Patrol saw the amphibian swerve toward shore and give up the try for whatever that precious life preserver had attached to it."No, for the time being the horrors are all over. That old man came to himself again, and swears that he has been robbed. He made an awful scene. He woke Mamie up, and I had to get her mother to come and see her. I believe Balmayne was nearly making an end of his victim when you knocked. And, oh, my dear boy, I shall be so glad to get away from this awful house."
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