TIME 55 



as an interesting illustration of this. The conductor depends 

 for guidance entirely on his own subjective time-measure- 

 ment, which he retards or accelerates by altering the intervals 

 and moving his baton now quicker, now slower. The baton 

 serves as an objective time-measurer for the instrumentalists, 

 and according to it they have to direct the bowing of the 

 violins and the blowing of the horns. 



The ability to separate accurately the accented moment- 

 signs from the unaccented, and to vary this change itself, is 

 very differently developed in different people ; and this is 

 the reason why all men are not fitted to become conductors 

 of orchestras. 



NUMBER 



Every one possesses the power of beating time, even if 

 only in a primitive form, and this power is the basis of com- 

 putation. We are able to combine the individual time-beats 

 into groups, and to free them from one another in other groups. 

 In this respect also there are great differences in natural 

 talent. There are people, wrongly called " lightning cal- 

 culators," who have a marked gift for constructing very 

 extensive and complicated groups. This power has nothing 

 to do with real arithmetic, for real calculation depends on a 

 conscious working with numbers and not on a grouping 

 of beats. 



Number is not an inborn natural creation, but an artificial 

 product of the human mind, and it consists of an objective 

 sign with which we describe the individual beats, just as a 

 letter of the alphabet serves as the visible sign for a certain 

 sound. 



In the beginning, number may have arisen by a man's 

 scratching lines alongside one another in the sand with his 

 hand as it beat time. For even to-day, every school-child 

 begins in this way when he writes strokes on the slate at his 



