Comparison in this mathematical sense is not some cognitive process in the head, some abstract way of organizing things in an interesting but finally arbitrary way. It is eerie proof that the external world really does correspond to the internal one. Such a comparative unity also explains what the physicist Eugene Wigner called, in 1960, the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics. Mathematics is so damned effective because the symbol system is “true”; that is, it gives constant witness to an uncanny correspondence between the human mind and the cosmos.
