Page:Philosophy and Fun of Algebra.djvu/64

PHILOSOPHY AND FUN OF ALGEBRA a safe road; and my imagination showed me that it was one along which I could travel quickly; therefore I started to go along it and waited to see where I got to. One consequence which came was that some of the people of Israël began telling me that I seemed to know things about their old books (even some old books that I had never read), which they themselves had never observed before; I had enabled them to get at real values for the x's and y's' of some of their problems.

Please notice that all this is pure imaginary hypothesis. Ancient peoples made a hypothesis, for which they had no authority, about angels; and I made one, for which I had no authority, about some of those supposed angels. And, by dealing logically with these imaginations, we got to some very real knowledge. 60