Ebook Canadian Income Taxation 2014 2015 Planning and Decision Making Canadian 17Th Edition Buckwold Test Bank Full Chapter PDF
Ebook Canadian Income Taxation 2014 2015 Planning and Decision Making Canadian 17Th Edition Buckwold Test Bank Full Chapter PDF
Ebook Canadian Income Taxation 2014 2015 Planning and Decision Making Canadian 17Th Edition Buckwold Test Bank Full Chapter PDF
1. Sarah Ives purchased a piece of land in 20X8 in order to operate a greenhouse and an evergreen nursery.
This was Sarah's first entrepreneurial adventure which she engaged in when not teaching her grade six
classes. Now, one year later, she still has not started her business and upon receiving an offer to teach on
a tropical island, has decided to sell the land. Which of the following statements is TRUE?
A. Sarah's primary intent suggests that the income should be treated as a business transaction.
B. Sarah purchased the land with the primary intent to resell it at a profit.
C. Sarah purchased the land with the primary intent to recognize a long-term economic benefit.
D. The intent of the purchase is insignificant when determining the type of income to report.
2. Which of the following rules regarding the tax treatment of a principal residence is FALSE?
A. If a taxpayer only owns one residence, the 'principal residence formula' reduces any capital gain on the
sale to nil.
B When a taxpayer owns more than one residence, the decision to designate a particular property as
. the 'principal residence' occurs at the time of sale.
C Properties can be designated to each married or common-law partner in a family for the purpose of
. reducing the gains on the sale of two principal residences.
D. A capital loss cannot be realized on the sale of a principal residence.
3. John sold a piece of land in 20X9 for $350,000. The land was recognized as capital property. The original
cost of the land was $75,000. The selling costs incurred in 20X9 were $5,000. The terms of the payment
included an immediate down payment of $50,000, with the remainder of the cost to be paid over the next
three years in three equal payments. John wishes to report the minimum taxable capital gain allowed each
year. How much will he report in 20X9? (Round all numbers to zero decimal places.)
A. $0
B. $27,000
C. $50,000
D. $216,000
4. Mandy holds shares in Y Co. Recently, the shares have been experiencing a decline in market value. She
originally purchased 1000 shares in 20X0 at $5 per share. On September 22nd of 20X1 she sold the shares
when they were trading for only $3 per share. On October 3rd she felt optimistic that the market value
would rise substantially by the end of the year, so she repurchased 1000 shares of Y Co. at $2.50 per
share. Which of the following is true for Mandy?
A. Mandy can recognize a $2,000 capital loss on the sale of her shares on her 20X1 tax return.
B. Mandy can recognize a $2,000 superficial loss on the sale of her shares on her 20X1 tax return.
C. The adjusted cost base of Mandy's new shares is $4,500.
D. The adjusted cost base of Mandy's new shares is $2,500.
5. When establishing whether the sale of an asset is capital income or business income, which of the
following is not one of the factors that the courts take into consideration when determining the original
intention of a transaction?
A. Period of ownership
B. Canadian securities test
C. Number and frequency of transactions
D. Relation of transaction to taxpayer's business
6. Mr. Yee sold a piece of land in 20X0 for $500,000. He originally paid $100,000 for the land. Selling
costs totalled $15,000. The land is classified as capital property. The purchaser of the land paid Mr. Yee
$80,000 in 20X0, and will pay $84,000 each year for the next five years.
Required:
Calculate the taxable capital gain that Mr. Yee will have to include in his income for tax purposes in
20X0 and 20X1.
Required:
Calculate the tax consequences of Greta's sales, placing the items into the appropriate categories of
capital property.
8. Anne Smith acquired her house in 20X0 for $150,000 and her cottage in 20X4 for $100,000. Due to a
rise in real estate prices, she decided to sell both properties and backpack around the world for two years.
Both properties were sold in October of 20X8. Anne received $375,000 in proceeds for the house, and
$250,000 for the cottage.
Required:
Calculate the minimum taxable capital gain that the Anne can report for her house and for her cottage on
her 20X8 tax return.
9. The following cases pertain to some of the unique aspects regarding the sale of various types of capital
properties. Next to each case, identify (from the list) the type of capital property that applies. (Select only
one category of capital property for each case and use each category only once.)
A. Sarah's primary intent suggests that the income should be treated as a business transaction.
B. Sarah purchased the land with the primary intent to resell it at a profit.
C. Sarah purchased the land with the primary intent to recognize a long-term economic benefit.
D. The intent of the purchase is insignificant when determining the type of income to report.
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Buckwold - Chapter 08 #1
2. Which of the following rules regarding the tax treatment of a principal residence is FALSE?
(p. 282) A. If a taxpayer only owns one residence, the 'principal residence formula' reduces any capital gain on
the sale to nil.
B When a taxpayer owns more than one residence, the decision to designate a particular property as
. the 'principal residence' occurs at the time of sale.
C Properties can be designated to each married or common-law partner in a family for the purpose of
. reducing the gains on the sale of two principal residences.
D. A capital loss cannot be realized on the sale of a principal residence.
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Buckwold - Chapter 08 #2
3. John sold a piece of land in 20X9 for $350,000. The land was recognized as capital property. The
(p. 275) original cost of the land was $75,000. The selling costs incurred in 20X9 were $5,000. The terms
of the payment included an immediate down payment of $50,000, with the remainder of the cost
to be paid over the next three years in three equal payments. John wishes to report the minimum
taxable capital gain allowed each year. How much will he report in 20X9? (Round all numbers to zero
decimal places.)
A. $0
B. $27,000
C. $50,000
D. $216,000
Bloom's: Application
Buckwold - Chapter 08 #3
4. Mandy holds shares in Y Co. Recently, the shares have been experiencing a decline in market value.
(p. 279) She originally purchased 1000 shares in 20X0 at $5 per share. On September 22nd of 20X1 she sold
the shares when they were trading for only $3 per share. On October 3rd she felt optimistic that the
market value would rise substantially by the end of the year, so she repurchased 1000 shares of Y Co.
at $2.50 per share. Which of the following is true for Mandy?
A. Mandy can recognize a $2,000 capital loss on the sale of her shares on her 20X1 tax return.
B. Mandy can recognize a $2,000 superficial loss on the sale of her shares on her 20X1 tax return.
C. The adjusted cost base of Mandy's new shares is $4,500.
D. The adjusted cost base of Mandy's new shares is $2,500.
Bloom's: Application
Buckwold - Chapter 08 #4
5. When establishing whether the sale of an asset is capital income or business income, which of the
(p. 269- following is not one of the factors that the courts take into consideration when determining the
271)
original intention of a transaction?
A. Period of ownership
B. Canadian securities test
C. Number and frequency of transactions
D. Relation of transaction to taxpayer's business
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Buckwold - Chapter 08 #5
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III
From this there follows a fact of decisive importance which has
hitherto been hidden from the mathematicians themselves.
There is not, and cannot be, number as such. There are several
number-worlds as there are several Cultures. We find an Indian, an
Arabian, a Classical, a Western type of mathematical thought and,
corresponding with each, a type of number—each type
fundamentally peculiar and unique, an expression of a specific
world-feeling, a symbol having a specific validity which is even
capable of scientific definition, a principle of ordering the Become
which reflects the central essence of one and only one soul, viz., the
soul of that particular Culture. Consequently, there are more
mathematics than one. For indubitably the inner structure of the
Euclidean geometry is something quite different from that of the
Cartesian, the analysis of Archimedes is something other than the
analysis of Gauss, and not merely in matters of form, intuition and
method but above all in essence, in the intrinsic and obligatory
meaning of number which they respectively develop and set forth.
This number, the horizon within which it has been able to make
phenomena self-explanatory, and therefore the whole of the “nature”
or world-extended that is confined in the given limits and amenable
to its particular sort of mathematic, are not common to all mankind,
but specific in each case to one definite sort of mankind.
The style of any mathematic which comes into being, then,
depends wholly on the Culture in which it is rooted, the sort of
mankind it is that ponders it. The soul can bring its inherent
possibilities to scientific development, can manage them practically,
can attain the highest levels in its treatment of them—but is quite
impotent to alter them. The idea of the Euclidean geometry is
actualized in the earliest forms of Classical ornament, and that of the
Infinitesimal Calculus in the earliest forms of Gothic architecture,
centuries before the first learned mathematicians of the respective
Cultures were born.
A deep inward experience, the genuine awakening of the ego,
which turns the child into the higher man and initiates him into
community of his Culture, marks the beginning of number-sense as it
does that of language-sense. It is only after this that objects come to
exist for the waking consciousness as things limitable and
distinguishable as to number and kind; only after this that properties,
concepts, causal necessity, system in the world-around, a form of
the world, and world laws (for that which is set and settled is ipso
facto bounded, hardened, number-governed) are susceptible of
exact definition. And therewith comes too a sudden, almost
metaphysical, feeling of anxiety and awe regarding the deeper
meaning of measuring and counting, drawing and form.
Now, Kant has classified the sum of human knowledge according
to syntheses a priori (necessary and universally valid) and a
posteriori (experiential and variable from case to case) and in the
former class has included mathematical knowledge. Thereby,
doubtless, he was enabled to reduce a strong inward feeling to
abstract form. But, quite apart from the fact (amply evidenced in
modern mathematics and mechanics) that there is no such sharp
distinction between the two as is originally and unconditionally
implied in the principle, the a priori itself, though certainly one of the
most inspired conceptions of philosophy, is a notion that seems to
involve enormous difficulties. With it Kant postulates—without
attempting to prove what is quite incapable of proof—both
unalterableness of form in all intellectual activity and identity of form
for all men in the same. And, in consequence, a factor of incalculable
importance is—thanks to the intellectual prepossessions of his
period, not to mention his own—simply ignored. This factor is the
varying degree of this alleged “universal validity.” There are
doubtless certain characters of very wide-ranging validity which are
(seemingly at any rate) independent of the Culture and century to
which the cognizing individual may belong, but along with these
there is a quite particular necessity of form which underlies all his
thought as axiomatic and to which he is subject by virtue of
belonging to his own Culture and no other. Here, then, we have two
very different kinds of a priori thought-content, and the definition of a
frontier between them, or even the demonstration that such exists, is
a problem that lies beyond all possibilities of knowing and will never
be solved. So far, no one has dared to assume that the supposed
constant structure of the intellect is an illusion and that the history
spread out before us contains more than one style of knowing. But
we must not forget that unanimity about things that have not yet
become problems may just as well imply universal error as universal
truth. True, there has always been a certain sense of doubt and
obscurity—so much so, that the correct guess might have been
made from that non-agreement of the philosophers which every
glance at the history of philosophy shows us. But that this non-
agreement is not due to imperfections of the human intellect or
present gaps in a perfectible knowledge, in a word, is not due to
defect, but to destiny and historical necessity—this is a discovery.
Conclusions on the deep and final things are to be reached not by
predicating constants but by studying differentiæ and developing the
organic logic of differences. The comparative morphology of
knowledge forms is a domain which Western thought has still to
attack.
IV
When, about 540 B.C., the circle of the Pythagoreans arrived at the
idea that number is the essence of all things, it was not “a step in the
development of mathematics” that was made, but a wholly new
mathematic that was born. Long heralded by metaphysical problem-
posings and artistic form-tendencies, now it came forth from the
depths of the Classical soul as a formulated theory, a mathematic
born in one act at one great historical moment—just as the
mathematic of the Egyptians had been, and the algebra-astronomy
of the Babylonian Culture with its ecliptic co-ordinate system—and
new—for these older mathematics had long been extinguished and
the Egyptian was never written down. Fulfilled by the 2nd century
A.D., the Classical mathematic vanished in its turn (for though it
seemingly exists even to-day, it is only as a convenience of notation
that it does so), and gave place to the Arabian. From what we know
of the Alexandrian mathematic, it is a necessary presumption that
there was a great movement within the Middle East, of which the
centre of gravity must have lain in the Persian-Babylonian schools
(such as Edessa, Gundisapora and Ctesiphon) and of which only
details found their way into the regions of Classical speech. In spite
of their Greek names, the Alexandrian mathematicians—Zenodorus
who dealt with figures of equal perimeter, Serenus who worked on
the properties of a harmonic pencil in space, Hypsicles who
introduced the Chaldean circle-division, Diophantus above all—were
all without doubt Aramæans, and their works only a small part of a
literature which was written principally in Syriac. This mathematic
found its completion in the investigations of the Arabian-Islamic
thinkers, and after these there was again a long interval. And then a
perfectly new mathematic was born, the Western, our own, which in
our infatuation we regard as “Mathematics,” as the culmination and
the implicit purpose of two thousand years’ evolution, though in
reality its centuries are (strictly) numbered and to-day almost spent.
The most valuable thing in the Classical mathematic is its
proposition that number is the essence of all things perceptible to the
senses. Defining number as a measure, it contains the whole world-
feeling of a soul passionately devoted to the “here” and the “now.”
Measurement in this sense means the measurement of something
near and corporeal. Consider the content of the Classical art-work,
say the free-standing statue of a naked man; here every essential
and important element of Being, its whole rhythm, is exhaustively
rendered by surfaces, dimensions and the sensuous relations of the
parts. The Pythagorean notion of the harmony of numbers, although
it was probably deduced from music—a music, be it noted, that knew
not polyphony or harmony, and formed its instruments to render
single plump, almost fleshy, tones—seems to be the very mould for a
sculpture that has this ideal. The worked stone is only a something in
so far as it has considered limits and measured form; what it is is
what it has become under the sculptor’s chisel. Apart from this it is a
chaos, something not yet actualized, in fact for the time being a null.
The same feeling transferred to the grander stage produces, as an
opposite to the state of chaos, that of cosmos, which for the
Classical soul implies a cleared-up situation of the external world, a
harmonic order which includes each separate thing as a well-
defined, comprehensible and present entity. The sum of such things
constitutes neither more nor less than the whole world, and the
interspaces between them, which for us are filled with the impressive
symbol of the Universe of Space, are for them the nonent (τὸ μὴ ὅν).
Extension means, for Classical mankind body, and for us space,
and it is as a function of space that, to us, things “appear.” And,
looking backward from this standpoint, we may perhaps see into the
deepest concept of the Classical metaphysics, Anaximander’s
ἄπειρον—a word that is quite untranslatable into any Western
tongue. It is that which possesses no “number” in the Pythagorean
sense of the word, no measurable dimensions or definable limits,
and therefore no being; the measureless, the negation of form, the
statue not yet carved out of the block; the ἀρχὴ optically boundless
and formless, which only becomes a something (namely, the world)
after being split up by the senses. It is the underlying form a priori of
Classical cognition, bodiliness as such, which is replaced exactly in
the Kantian world-picture by that Space out of which Kant
maintained that all things could be “thought forth.”
We can now understand what it is that divides one mathematic
from another, and in particular the Classical from the Western. The
whole world-feeling of the matured Classical world led it to see
mathematics only as the theory of relations of magnitude, dimension
and form between bodies. When, from out of this feeling, Pythagoras
evolved and expressed the decisive formula, number had come, for
him, to be an optical symbol—not a measure of form generally, an
abstract relation, but a frontier-post of the domain of the Become, or
rather of that part of it which the senses were able to split up and
pass under review. By the whole Classical world without exception
numbers are conceived as units of measure, as magnitude, lengths,
or surfaces, and for it no other sort of extension is imaginable. The
whole Classical mathematic is at bottom Stereometry (solid
geometry). To Euclid, who rounded off its system in the third century,
the triangle is of deep necessity the bounding surface of a body,
never a system of three intersecting straight lines or a group of three
points in three-dimensional space. He defines a line as “length
without breadth” (μῆκος ἀπλατές). In our mouths such a definition
would be pitiful—in the Classical mathematic it was brilliant.
The Western number, too, is not, as Kant and even Helmholtz
thought, something proceeding out of Time as an a priori form of
conception, but is something specifically spatial, in that it is an order
(or ordering) of like units. Actual time (as we shall see more and
more clearly in the sequel) has not the slightest relation with
mathematical things. Numbers belong exclusively to the domain of
extension. But there are precisely as many possibilities—and
therefore necessities—of ordered presentation of the extended as
there are Cultures. Classical number is a thought-process dealing
not with spatial relations but with visibly limitable and tangible units,
and it follows naturally and necessarily that the Classical knows only
the “natural” (positive and whole) numbers, which on the contrary
play in our Western mathematics a quite undistinguished part in the
midst of complex, hypercomplex, non-Archimedean and other
number-systems.
On this account, the idea of irrational numbers—the unending
decimal fractions of our notation—was unrealizable within the Greek
spirit. Euclid says—and he ought to have been better understood—
that incommensurable lines are “not related to one another like
numbers.” In fact, it is the idea of irrational number that, once
achieved, separates the notion of number from that of magnitude, for
the magnitude of such a number (π, for example) can never be
defined or exactly represented by any straight line. Moreover, it
follows from this that in considering the relation, say, between
diagonal and side in a square the Greek would be brought up
suddenly against a quite other sort of number, which was
fundamentally alien to the Classical soul, and was consequently
feared as a secret of its proper existence too dangerous to be
unveiled. There is a singular and significant late-Greek legend,
according to which the man who first published the hidden mystery
of the irrational perished by shipwreck, “for the unspeakable and the
formless must be left hidden for ever.”[50]
The fear that underlies this legend is the selfsame notion that
prevented even the ripest Greeks from extending their tiny city-states
so as to organize the country-side politically, from laying out their
streets to end in prospects and their alleys to give vistas, that made
them recoil time and again from the Babylonian astronomy with its
penetration of endless starry space,[51] and refuse to venture out of
the Mediterranean along sea-paths long before dared by the
Phœnicians and the Egyptians. It is the deep metaphysical fear that
the sense-comprehensible and present in which the Classical
existence had entrenched itself would collapse and precipitate its
cosmos (largely created and sustained by art) into unknown primitive
abysses. And to understand this fear is to understand the final
significance of Classical number—that is, measure in contrast to the
immeasurable—and to grasp the high ethical significance of its
limitation. Goethe too, as a nature-student, felt it—hence his almost
terrified aversion to mathematics, which as we can now see was
really an involuntary reaction against the non-Classical mathematic,
the Infinitesimal Calculus which underlay the natural philosophy of
his time.
Religious feeling in Classical man focused itself ever more and
more intensely upon physically present, localized cults which alone
expressed a college of Euclidean deities. Abstractions, dogmas
floating homeless in the space of thought, were ever alien to it. A cult
of this kind has as much in common with a Roman Catholic dogma
as the statue has with the cathedral organ. There is no doubt that
something of cult was comprised in the Euclidean mathematic—
consider, for instance, the secret doctrines of the Pythagoreans and
the Theorems of regular polyhedrons with their esoteric significance
in the circle of Plato. Just so, there is a deep relation between
Descartes’ analysis of the infinite and contemporary dogmatic
theology as it progressed from the final decisions of the Reformation
and the Counter-Reformation to entirely desensualized deism.
Descartes and Pascal were mathematicians and Jansenists, Leibniz
a mathematician and pietist. Voltaire, Lagrange and D’Alembert were
contemporaries. Now, the Classical soul felt the principle of the
irrational, which overturned the statuesquely-ordered array of whole
numbers and the complete and self-sufficing world-order for which
these stood, as an impiety against the Divine itself. In Plato’s
“Timæus” this feeling is unmistakable. For the transformation of a
series of discrete numbers into a continuum challenged not merely
the Classical notion of number but the Classical world-idea itself, and
so it is understandable that even negative numbers, which to us offer
no conceptual difficulty, were impossible in the Classical mathematic,
let alone zero as a number, that refined creation of a wonderful
abstractive power which, for the Indian soul that conceived it as base
for a positional numeration, was nothing more nor less than the key
to the meaning of existence. Negative magnitudes have no
existence. The expression -2×-3=+6 is neither something
perceivable nor a representation of magnitude. The series of
magnitudes ends with +1, and in graphic representation of negative
numbers
+3+2+10-1-2-3
( —・—・—・ ・—・—・—・
)
we have suddenly, from zero onwards, positive symbols of
something negative; they mean something, but they no longer are.
But the fulfilment of this act did not lie within the direction of Classical
number-thinking.
Every product of the waking consciousness of the Classical world,
then, is elevated to the rank of actuality by way of sculptural
definition. That which cannot be drawn is not “number.” Archytas and
Eudoxus use the terms surface- and volume-numbers to mean what
we call second and third powers, and it is easy to understand that
the notion of higher integral powers did not exist for them, for a
fourth power would predicate at once, for the mind based on the
plastic feeling, an extension in four dimensions, and four material
dimensions into the bargain, “which is absurd.” Expressions like εix
which we constantly use, or even the fractional index (e.g., 5½) which
is employed in the Western mathematics as early as Oresme (14th
Century), would have been to them utter nonsense. Euclid calls the
factors of a product its sides πλευραί and fractions (finite of course)
were treated as whole-number relationships between two lines.
Clearly, out of this no conception of zero as a number could possibly
come, for from the point of view of a draughtsman it is meaningless.
We, having minds differently constituted, must not argue from our
habits to theirs and treat their mathematic as a “first stage” in the
development of “Mathematics.” Within and for the purposes of the
world that Classical man evolved for himself, the Classical
mathematic was a complete thing—it is merely not so for us.
Babylonian and Indian mathematics had long contained, as essential
elements of their number-worlds, things which the Classical number-
feeling regarded as nonsense—and not from ignorance either, since
many a Greek thinker was acquainted with them. It must be
repeated, “Mathematics” is an illusion. A mathematical, and,
generally, a scientific way of thinking is right, convincing, a “necessity
of thought,” when it completely expresses the life-feeling proper to it.
Otherwise it is either impossible, futile and senseless, or else, as we
in the arrogance of our historical soul like to say, “primitive.” The
modern mathematic, though “true” only for the Western spirit, is
undeniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have
seemed a ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to
the “true”—to wit, the Classical—mathematic. And so with ourselves.
Plainly, we have almost no notion of the multitude of great ideas
belonging to other Cultures that we have suffered to lapse because
our thought with its limitations has not permitted us to assimilate
them, or (which comes to the same thing) has led us to reject them
as false, superfluous, and nonsensical.
VI
The Greek mathematic, as a science of perceivable magnitudes,
deliberately confines itself to facts of the comprehensibly present,
and limits its researches and their validity to the near and the small.
As compared with this impeccable consistency, the position of the
Western mathematic is seen to be, practically, somewhat illogical,
though it is only since the discovery of Non-Euclidean Geometry that
the fact has been really recognized. Numbers are images of the
perfectly desensualized understanding, of pure thought, and contain
their abstract validity within themselves.[52] Their exact application to
the actuality of conscious experience is therefore a problem in itself
—a problem which is always being posed anew and never solved—
and the congruence of mathematical system with empirical
observation is at present anything but self-evident. Although the lay
idea—as found in Schopenhauer—is that mathematics rest upon the
direct evidences of the senses, Euclidean geometry, superficially
identical though it is with the popular geometry of all ages, is only in
agreement with the phenomenal world approximately and within very
narrow limits—in fact, the limits of a drawing-board. Extend these
limits, and what becomes, for instance, of Euclidean parallels? They
meet at the line of the horizon—a simple fact upon which all our art-
perspective is grounded.
Now, it is unpardonable that Kant, a Western thinker, should have
evaded the mathematic of distance, and appealed to a set of figure-
examples that their mere pettiness excludes from treatment by the
specifically Western infinitesimal methods. But Euclid, as a thinker of
the Classical age, was entirely consistent with its spirit when he
refrained from proving the phenomenal truth of his axioms by
referring to, say, the triangle formed by an observer and two infinitely
distant fixed stars. For these can neither be drawn nor “intuitively
apprehended” and his feeling was precisely the feeling which shrank
from the irrationals, which did not dare to give nothingness a value
as zero (i.e., a number) and even in the contemplation of cosmic
relations shut its eyes to the Infinite and held to its symbol of
Proportion.
Aristarchus of Samos, who in 288-277 belonged to a circle of
astronomers at Alexandria that doubtless had relations with
Chaldaeo-Persian schools, projected the elements of a heliocentric
world-system.[53] Rediscovered by Copernicus, it was to shake the
metaphysical passions of the West to their foundations—witness
Giordano Bruno[54]—to become the fulfilment of mighty premonitions,
and to justify that Faustian, Gothic world-feeling which had already
professed its faith in infinity through the forms of its cathedrals. But
the world of Aristarchus received his work with entire indifference
and in a brief space of time it was forgotten—designedly, we may
surmise. His few followers were nearly all natives of Asia Minor, his
most prominent supporter Seleucus (about 150) being from the
Persian Seleucia on Tigris. In fact, the Aristarchian system had no
spiritual appeal to the Classical Culture and might indeed have
become dangerous to it. And yet it was differentiated from the
Copernican (a point always missed) by something which made it
perfectly conformable to the Classical world-feeling, viz., the
assumption that the cosmos is contained in a materially finite and
optically appreciable hollow sphere, in the middle of which the
planetary system, arranged as such on Copernican lines, moved. In
the Classical astronomy, the earth and the heavenly bodies are
consistently regarded as entities of two different kinds, however
variously their movements in detail might be interpreted. Equally, the
opposite idea that the earth is only a star among stars[55] is not
inconsistent in itself with either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican
systems and in fact was pioneered by Nicolaus Cusanus and
Leonardo da Vinci. But by this device of a celestial sphere the
principle of infinity which would have endangered the sensuous-
Classical notion of bounds was smothered. One would have
supposed that the infinity-conception was inevitably implied by the
system of Aristarchus—long before his time, the Babylonian thinkers
had reached it. But no such thought emerges. On the contrary, in the
famous treatise on the grains of sand[56] Archimedes proves that the
filling of this stereometric body (for that is what Aristarchus’s Cosmos
is, after all) with atoms of sand leads to very high, but not to infinite,
figure-results. This proposition, quoted though it may be, time and
again, as being a first step towards the Integral Calculus, amounts to
a denial (implicit indeed in the very title) of everything that we mean
by the word analysis. Whereas in our physics, the constantly-surging
hypotheses of a material (i.e., directly cognizable) æther, break
themselves one after the other against our refusal to acknowledge
material limitations of any kind, Eudoxus, Apollonius and
Archimedes, certainly the keenest and boldest of the Classical
mathematicians, completely worked out, in the main with rule and
compass, a purely optical analysis of things-become on the basis of
sculptural-Classical bounds. They used deeply-thought-out (and for
us hardly understandable) methods of integration, but these possess
only a superficial resemblance even to Leibniz’s definite-integral
method. They employed geometrical loci and co-ordinates, but these
are always specified lengths and units of measurement and never,
as in Fermat and above all in Descartes, unspecified spatial
relations, values of points in terms of their positions in space. With
these methods also should be classed the exhaustion-method of
Archimedes,[57] given by him in his recently discovered letter to
Eratosthenes on such subjects as the quadrature of the parabola
section by means of inscribed rectangles (instead of through similar
polygons). But the very subtlety and extreme complication of his
methods, which are grounded in certain of Plato’s geometrical ideas,
make us realize, in spite of superficial analogies, what an enormous
difference separates him from Pascal. Apart altogether from the idea
of Riemann’s integral, what sharper contrast could there be to these
ideas than the so-called quadratures of to-day? The name itself is
now no more than an unfortunate survival, the “surface” is indicated
by a bounding function, and the drawing as such, has vanished.
Nowhere else did the two mathematical minds approach each other
more closely than in this instance, and nowhere is it more evident
that the gulf between the two souls thus expressing themselves is
impassable.
In the cubic style of their early architecture the Egyptians, so to
say, concealed pure numbers, fearful of stumbling upon their secret,
and for the Hellenes too they were the key to the meaning of the
become, the stiffened, the mortal. The stone statue and the scientific
system deny life. Mathematical number, the formal principle of an
extension-world of which the phenomenal existence is only the
derivative and servant of waking human consciousness, bears the
hall-mark of causal necessity and so is linked with death as
chronological number is with becoming, with life, with the necessity
of destiny. This connexion of strict mathematical form with the end of
organic being, with the phenomenon of its organic remainder the
corpse, we shall see more and more clearly to be the origin of all
great art. We have already noticed the development of early
ornament on funerary equipments and receptacles. Numbers are
symbols of the mortal. Stiff forms are the negation of life, formulas
and laws spread rigidity over the face of nature, numbers make dead
—and the “Mothers” of Faust II sit enthroned, majestic and
withdrawn, in
VII