That would not yet be sufficient, because we should get in this way only certain incommensurable numbers and not all those numbers.
But conceive of a straight line divided into two rays. Each of these rays will appear to our imagination as a band of a certain breadth; these bands moreover will encroach one on the other, since there must be no interval between them. The common part will appear to us as a point which will always remain when we try to imagine our bands narrower and narrower, so that we admit as an intuitive truth that if a straight is cut into two rays their common frontier is a point; we recognize here the conception of Dedekind, in which an incommensurable number was regarded as the common frontier of two classes of rational numbers.
Such is the origin of the continuum of the second order, which is the mathematical continuum properly so called.
Résumé.—In recapitulation, the mind has the faculty of creating symbols, and it is thus that it has constructed the mathematical continuum, which is only a particular system of symbols. Its power is limited only by the necessity of avoiding all contradiction; but the mind only makes use of this faculty if experience furnishes it a stimulus thereto.
In the case considered, this stimulus was the notion of the physical continuum, drawn from the rough data of the senses. But this notion leads to a series of contradictions from which it is necessary successively to free ourselves. So we are forced to imagine a more and more complicated system of symbols. That at which we stop is not only exempt from internal contradiction (it was so already at all the stages we have traversed), but neither is it in contradiction with various propositions called intuitive, which are derived from empirical notions more or less elaborated.
Measurable Magnitude.—The magnitudes we have studied hitherto are not measurable; we can indeed say whether a given one of these magnitudes is greater than another, but not whether it is twice or thrice as great.
So far, I have only considered the order in which our terms are ranged. But for most applications that does not suffice. We must learn to compare the interval which separates any two terms. Only on this condition does the continuum become a measurable magnitude and the operations of arithmetic applicable.
This can only be done by the aid of a new and special convention. We will agree that in such and such a case the interval comprised between the terms A and B is equal to the interval which separates C and D. For example, at the beginning of our work we have set out from the scale of the whole numbers and we have supposed intercalated between two consecutive steps n intermediary steps; well, these new steps will be by convention regarded as equidistant.
This is a way of defining the addition of two magnitudes, because if the interval AB is by definition equal to the interval CD, the interval AD will be by definition the sum of the intervals AB and AC.
This definition is arbitrary in a very large measure. It is not completely so, however. It is subjected to certain conditions and, for example, to the rules of commutativity and associativity of addition. But provided the definition chosen satisfies these rules, the choice is indifferent, and it is useless to particularize it.
Various Remarks.—We can now discuss several important questions:
1º Is the creative power of the mind exhausted by the creation of the mathematical continuum?