Yevgeny Zamyatin — We [347]

The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions— differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty. And it is the understanding of this beauty that the other one, I-330, lacks. — Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 347

Note

The narrator defines reason not as expansion or flight, but as enclosure and reduction—‘the continuous limitation of infinity’—turning a mathematical concept into an aesthetic and political justification for totalitarian control.