ABSTRACT
Mathematics is a study which, when we start from its most familiar portions, may be pursued in either of two opposite directions. Early Greek geometers, passing from the empirical rules of Egyptian land-surveying to the general propositions by which those rules were found to be justifiable, and thence to Euclid’s axioms and postulates, were engaged in mathematical philosophy, according to the definition. All traditional pure mathematics, including analytical geometry, may be regarded as consisting wholly of propositions about the natural numbers. The logical “weight,” if one may use such an expression, is equal to that of the whole series of sciences that have been deduced from the theory of the natural numbers; the truth of this whole series is assured if the truth of the five primitive propositions is guaranteed, provided, of course, that there is nothing erroneous in the purely logical apparatus which is also involved.
