ABSTRACT
Familiarity with machines that European societies could construct and operate completed the transformation of the personal: or animistic category of cause into a mechanistic one that since Newton has done such signal service in physics. The latest transformation of the “eternal” category in turn is similarly related on the one hand to the invention and construction of electronic machines that are no longer cyclical and on the other to the creation of symbolic-vehicles-for intellectual tools, e.g., for expressing, and operating with, mathematical probability. All have been objective in as much as a social convention has invested the symbol with meaning, and some society by incorporating the word in its language has imposed the idea on its members. The verbal symbol, “space,” in English, is a convenient expression like “electricity,” but it too is a dangerous one and may mislead.
