when you use well-known brands.”

     Like money and clocks and all other forms of 
measurement, numbers acquired a separate life and intensity 
with the growth of literacy. Nonliterate societies had small use 
for numbers, and today the nonliterate digital computer 
substitutes “yes” and “no” for numbers. The computer is 
strong on contours, weak on digits. In effect, then, the electric 
age brings number back into unity with visual and auditory 
experience, for good or ill.

     Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West  originated in 
large part from his concern with the new mathematics. Non-
Euclidean geometries, on one hand, and the rise of functions in 
number theory, on the other, seemed to Spengler to spell the 
end of Western man. He had not grasped the fact that the