Finally, Two Days Ago, I Succeeded -

Life Stands Before Me Like An Eternal Spring With New And Brilliant Clothes.

I Am Coming More And More To The Conviction That The Necessity Of Our Geometry Cannot Be Demonstrated, At Least Neither By, Nor For, The Human Intellect. . . Geometry Should Be Ranked, Not With Arithmetic, Which Is Purely Aprioristic, But With Mechanics.

You Have No Idea, How Much Poetry There Is In The Calculation Of A Table Of Logarithms!

That This Subject [of Imaginary Magnitudes] Has Hitherto Been Considered From The Wrong Point Of View And Surrounded By A Mysterious Obscurity, Is To Be Attributed Largely To An Ill-adapted Notation. If, For Example, +1, -1, And The Square Root Of -1 Had Been Called Direct, Inverse And Lateral Units, Instead Of Positive, Negative And Imaginary (or Even Impossible), Such An Obscurity Would Have Been Out Of The Question.

In The Last Two Months I Have Been Very Busy With My Own Mathematical Speculations, Which Have Cost Me Much Time, Without My Having Reached My Original Goal. Again And Again I Was Enticed By The Frequently Interesting Prospects From One Direction To The Other, Sometimes Even By Will-o'-the-wisps, As Is Not Rare In Mathematic Speculations.