long been processed by print these metaphors would have 
carried no interest whatever. Let us turn to a book by a 
mathematician, Sir Edmund Whittaker, which explains how 
some of this came to be. A passage of Kant’s from the Critique  
of Practical Reason  (p. 14) will usher us into this territory: 
“Since mathematics irrefutably proves the infinite divisibility of 
space which empiricism cannot allow, there is an obvious 
contradiction between the highest possible demonstrable 
evidence and the alleged inferences from empirical principles. . . . 
One might ask like Cheseldren’s blind man, ‘Which deceives 
me, sight or touch?’ Empiricism is based on touch, but 
rationalism on a necessity which can be seen.” Not only did 
Kant not know that number is audile-tactile and infinitely 
repeatable, but that the visual, in abstraction from the audile-
tactile, sets up a world of antinomies and dichotomies of 
insoluble but irrelevant kind.