Page:Philosophy and Fun of Algebra.djvu/73

 CHAPTER XIII THE GREAT X OF THE WORLD

question which people like to quarrel about is:—Who or What made things be as they are? As soon as people grew clever enough to think about anything except scrambling for food and taking care of their own babies, they began quarrelling about Who or What made things be. Nobody knew anything about it; and most people had a great deal to say about it. Moses saw that there was no hope of getting a country orderly while all this confusion was going on; so he said to the Hebrews, "I must not allow all this confusion to go on among a people that I am made responsible for. None of us have ever seen the Maker of things. We can see the things growing, but not the force that makes them. That is our X; our Unknown. We are going to begin by stating that we don't know. We are going to call the Maker of things 'I Am,' or 'That which is, whatever it is'; and we are going 69