Formulae

Your banking "product" is a matrix full of arbitrary formulae.

The normal mind, when it experiences intellectual frustration, can seek recreation in companionship, or physical exercise, or art. But for the Fourth Men there was no such escape. These activities were impossible and meaningless to them. The Great Brains were whole-heartedly interested in the objective world, but solely as a vast stimulus to intellection, never for its own sake. They admired only the intellective process itself and the interpretative formulae and principles which it devised. They cared no more for men and women than for material in a test-tube, no more for one another than for mechanical calculators. Nay, of each one of them it might almost be said that he cared even for himself solely as an instrument of knowing. Many of the species had actually sacrificed their sanity, even in some cases their lives, to the obsessive lust of intellection.

The Newtonian law of gravitation afforded a complete explanation of the rise and fall of the waters of the oceans, but as applied to the motions of planets and satellites by the Lagrangian formulae, it presupposed that all these bodies are rigid and unyielding.