But in addition to this reenactment of what is
given in the initial
data, there is also a «secondary origination of conceptual feeling with
data which are partially
identical with, and partially diverse from, the eternal objects» derived from the initial
data.
Many different ways to represent magnitude exist, and as I showed together with colleagues some 20 years ago, different plotting techniques can
give rise to very different impressions for
identical data.
When Descartes» analytical geometry treated space and extension, the res extensa of nature and the world, so «that its relations, however complicated, must always be expressible in algebraic formulae,» mathematics succeeded in reducing and translating all that man is not into patterns which are
identical with human, mental structures... Now the phenomena could be saved only in so far as they could be reduced to a mathematical order, and this mathematical operation does not serve to prepare man's mind for the revelation of true being... that appear in the sensually
given data, but serves, on the contrary, to reduce these
data to the measures of the human mind, which,
given enough distance, being sufficiently remote and uninvolved, can look upon and handle the multitude and variety of the concrete in accordance with its own patterns and symbols....