Practical Citizenship

e of pleasure which came to him from reading this sentence during his school and college days is shared by every foreigner, as soon as the sentence meets his eye. Least familiar may be the knowledge of the origin of this pleasure. In olden times our forbears were accustomed to think of such a sense of satisfaction as being in some dim way connected with vital functions seated in the deeper recesses of the mind or soul, and they therefore, in an equally dim way, attached a sense of "sacredness" to certain numbers, such as three, four, seven and twelve. There was at first no reason for this. But presently men began to philosophize upon the topic, and when the Greeks and the Hindus took hold of matters of this kind, they usually went through the entire process of reasoning so thoroughly that little is left for their successors to accomplish. As to the number three, this is what they found. Time has three conditions: a past, a present and a future, of which the past and future are realizable parts and the present is a non-realizable part, for as you try to think of the actual present moment, it is gone and is past. The present, therefore, is a sort of pivot on which the past and future hinge. In the same way Space has three conditions, which the Anglo-Saxon tribes have defined as "length, breadth and thickness," while the Indo-Aryans have settled upon "Space, Time and Condition" as being the definition. This latter because both space and time are matters o...