Page:Philosophy and Fun of Algebra.djvu/69

MACBETH'S MISTAKE carry me into danger." But Macbeth had either not learnt algebra at school, or, if he had, he had only crammed it up for examination out of a text-book, and not learned it as the Science of the Laws of Thought.

Another day his imagination showed him a dagger. A dagger is a thing to kill people with. As a soldier, he had probably used a real one in war. But, if he had had any proper nerve training, he would have known that when his imagination was so vivid that he did not, for the moment, know an imaginary dagger from a real one, he ought immediately to "go slack"; to lie down and think about the moors or the sky, or about anything or anybody that was not connected with doing anything in particular, with planning anything, with taking any resolution, and especially with breaking any of the Ten Commandments. He had already told his wife about the three old women. If she had been a sensible woman, she would have told him that she wanted to go away from home; and got him to take her right away for a few weeks; and kept him busy 65