Truth to say, the theory of intelligence in the animal would be so extraordinary as to be almost untenable. If we are determined, at whatever cost, to pin our faith to it, we are bound to call in the aid of other ideas, to appeal, for instance, to the extremely mysterious and essentially uncomprehended and incomprehensible nature of numbers. It is almost certain that the science of mathematics lies outside the intelligence. It forms a mechanical and abstract whole, more spiritual than material and more material than spiritual, visible only through its shadow and yet constituting the most immovable of the realities that govern the universe. From first to last it declares itself a very strange force and, as it were, the sovereign of another element than that which nourishes our brain. Secret, indifferent, imperious and implacable, it subjugates and oppresses us from a great height or a great depth, in any case, from very far, without telling us why. One might say that figures place those who handle them in a special condition. They draw the cabalistic circle around their victim. Henceforth, he is no longer his own master, he renounces his liberty, he is literally "possessed" by the powers which he invokes. He is dragged he knows not whither, into a formless, boundless immensity, subject to laws that have nothing human about them, in which each of those lively and tyrannical little signs which move and dance in their thousands under the pen represents nameless, but eternal, invincible and inevitable verities. We think that we are directing them and they enslave us. We become weary and breathless following them into their uninhabitable spaces. When we touch them, we let loose a force which we are no longer able to control. They do with us what they will and always end by hurling us, blinded and benumbed, into blank infinity or upon a wall of ice against which every effort of our mind and will is shattered.