xx: “The fundamental codes of a culture…. establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.”

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility - without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises - were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (p. 387)

Playfair tries to explain the bar chart:

Suppose the money received by a man in trade were all in guineas,and that every evening he made a single pile of all the guineas received during that day, each pile would represent a day, and its height would be proportional to the receipts of that day; so that by this plain operation,time, proportion, and amount, would all be physically combined. Lineal arithmetic, then, it may be averred, is nothing more than those piles of guineas represented on paper.