Immeasurable is a term that has its origin in the Latin word imensurabilis . This adjective refers to something that is very difficult to measure or cannot be measured. For example: "The immeasurable ocean overwhelmed him" , "I feel immeasurable sadness since your departure" , "The wealth of some oil magnates is immeasurable" .
The concept of immeasurable, therefore, can be linked to things that, due to their size or other characteristics, are almost impossible to measure. This is not a concrete impossibility, but rather a practical one. The sea, in this sense, is immeasurable: in theory, it is possible to determine how much water it houses and express this amount in liters or another equivalent unit. However, developing such a measurement is virtually impossible due to technical difficulties.
Something similar can be expressed with respect to the amount of hair that a human being has. Although it is possible to count them, since their number is finite and they are large enough to be manipulated by our hands and visualized by our eyes, it could be a truly complicated task, unless you have the right means. Science has determined that our scalp houses between 100 and 150 million hairs, which shows that not everyone could reach this number at home, in front of the mirror.
Other things, on the other hand, are immeasurable since there is no possibility of quantifying them. Just as the sea or hair are ideally measurable, the same cannot be said for feelings, emotions, or abstract concepts. The happiness is immeasurable because we can only consider certain symptoms that are a reflection of it, but we can not attain happiness itself to measure it or post it. The soul, spirit, faith, love and hate are also immeasurable.
Although the academic definition of materialism speaks of a philosophical current that opposes idealism in terms of the importance of thought and consciousness rather than matter, placing it as the origin of the former, popular language refers to this term to describe the attitude of someone who values material goods more than feelings and relationships with other living beings.
The relative nature of the immeasurable demonstrates that human wisdom is changing, changing as we evolve, question ourselves, and question our convictions, no matter how deeply rooted they are in our cultures. Just as certain diseases seemed incurable centuries ago and today have been eradicated or can be treated and overcome without any complications, science allows us to observe and study microscopic organisms, which would have been unthinkable in the not-so-distant past.
In other words, when using the term immeasurable we must accept that this assessment may not be valid in the future, without meaning that it is valid in the present. It is one of the features of our way of understanding life, of our constant need to analyze our environment to discover the secrets it hides. Despite knowing that certain investigations have taken decades, we refuse to put certain phenomena aside until we are able to understand them, and we hasten to qualify them with the tools we have at our disposal.