Page:Our knowledge of the external world.djvu/220

 shall say that the two collections are “similar.” We have just seen that two similar collections have the same number of terms. This leads us to define the number of a given collection as the class of all collections that are similar to it; that is to say, we set up the following formal definition:

“The number of terms in a given class” is defined as meaning “the class of all classes that are similar to the given class.”

This definition, as Frege (expressing it in slightly different terms) showed, yields the usual arithmetical properties of numbers. It is applicable equally to finite and infinite numbers, and it does not require the admission of some new and mysterious set of metaphysical entities. It shows that it is not physical objects, but classes or the general terms by which they are defined, of which numbers can be asserted; and it applies to 0 and 1 without any of the difficulties which other theories find in dealing with these two special cases.

The above definition is sure to produce, at first sight, a feeling of oddity, which is liable to cause a certain dissatisfaction. It defines the number 2, for instance, as the class of all couples, and the number 3 as the class of all triads. This does not seem to be what we have hitherto been meaning when we spoke of 2 and 3, though it would be difficult to say what we had been meaning. The answer to a feeling cannot be a logical argument, but nevertheless the answer in this case is not without importance. In the first place, it will be found that when an idea which has grown familiar as an unanalysed whole is first resolved accurately into its component parts—which is what we do when we define it—there is almost always a feeling of unfamiliarity produced by the analysis, which tends to cause a protest against the definition. In