Each of the great Cultures, then, has arrived at a secret language of world-feeling that is only fully comprehensible by him whose soul belongs to that Culture. We must not deceive ourselves. Perhaps we can read a little way into the Classical soul, because its form-language is almost the exact inversion of the Western; how far we have succeeded or can ever succeed is a question which necessarily forms the starting- point of all criticism of the Renaissance, and it is a very difficult one. But when we are told that probably (it is at best a doubtful venture to meditate upon so alien an expression of Being) the Indians conceived numbers which according to our ideas possessed neither value nor magnitude nor relativity, and which only became positive and negative, great or small units in virtue of position, we have to admit that it is impossible for us exactly to re-experience what spiritually underlies this kind of number. For us, 3 is always _something_, be it positive or negative; for the Greeks it was unconditionally a positive magnitude, +3; but for the Indian it indicates a possibility without existence, to which the word “something” is _not yet_ applicable, outside both existence and non-existence which are _properties_ to be introduced into it. +3, -3, ⅓, are thus emanating actualities of subordinate rank which reside in the mysterious substance (3) in some way that is entirely hidden from us. It takes a Brahmanic soul to perceive these numbers as self-evident, as ideal emblems of a self- complete world-form; to us they are as unintelligible as is the Brahman Nirvana, for which, as lying beyond life _and_ death, sleep _and_ waking, passion, compassion _and_ dispassion and yet somehow actual, words entirely fail us. Only this spirituality could originate the grand conception of _nothingness as a true number, zero_, and even then this zero is the Indian zero for which existent and non-existent are equally external designations.[189] Arabian thinkers of the ripest period—and they included minds of the very first order like Alfarabi and Alkabi—in controverting the ontology of Aristotle, _proved_ that the body as such did not necessarily assume space for existence, and deduced the essence of this space—the _Arabian_ kind of extension, that is—from the characteristic of “one’s being in a position.” But this does not prove that as against Aristotle and Kant they were in error or that their thinking was muddled (as we so readily say of what our own brains cannot take in). It shows that the Arabian spirit possessed other world-categories than our own. They could have rebutted Kant, or Kant them, with the same subtlety of proof—and both disputants would have remained convinced of the correctness of their respective standpoints.