In Integral Relational Logic, measure is the value of an attribute of an entity in a class, as primal concepts, grouped in domains of values, as dimensions. Measures could thus be qualitative or quantitative, as they are in information systems modelling methods in business.

Numerically, measures could be a valid range of possible ages for humans or the heights of mountains in some units, for instance, or simply the count of the members in a set. Qualitatively, measures can be anything whatever, such as capital cities, the models of cars, pieces or styles of music, or geometric shapes in some context.

Such an abstract concept of measure is essential to integrate all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines into a coherent whole. For such a Method could provide the coordinating framework for a life-enhancing system of governance, free of our cultural conditioning, designed for the benefit of all humans, as we rapidly approach our inevitable demise as a species.

In contrast, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) gave a lecture in the  1890s, on ‘Electrical Units of Measurement’, in which he said, “To measure is to know,” and “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”

This quantitative concept of measure, epitomized in money, has since been incorporated into dehumanizing business practices, where it is said, “If you cannot measure, you cannot manage.” The conventional scientific notion of measure was the last of Arthur Koestler’s four pillars of unwisdom in The Ghost in the Machine, highlighting the absurdities and limitations of the biological, behavioural, mechanistic, and quantitative sciences.

Modern science and business in our profoundly sick society have thus taken measure far beyond its original meaning of ‘moderation’, meting out resources in appropriate proportion and ratio, at the heart of sound reason, as David Bohm pointed out in an extensive passage in ‘Fragmentation and Wholeness’ in 1976, republished as the first chapter of Wholeness and the Implicate Order in 1980.

Furthermore, as Bohm said, in the East, the immeasurable has long been regarded as the primary reality, where māyā, cognate with measure, is secondary. He also pointed out that Sanskrit mātra, which can mean ‘measure’ in a musical sense, is also cognate with Greek metron, root of metronome, as a device for pacing music. So, by being grounded in the Divine, from which we are never separate, we can truly enjoy measure as ‘the rhythm of a line of poetry or piece of music’.