Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?

Euclid for children is barbarous.

Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?

We do not dwell in the Palace of Truth. But, as was mentioned to me not long since, "There is a time coming when all things shall be found out." I am not so sanguine myself, believing that the well in which Truth is said to reside is really a bottomless pit.

However absurd it may seem, I do in all seriousness hereby declare that I am animated mainly by philanthropic motives. I desire to do good to my fellow creatures, even to the Cui bonos.

It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties in Euclid's Elements, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally .. obvious.

Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on.