The strange modern people do not think so. The normal (abnormal) Western man of 1930 who swims abreast of the currents of his time, who accepts the typical teaching of his day and generation or who, learned or lewd, awarely or unawares, is influenced by it, probably does not think so. The Great Naturalistic Revolution of the past hundred years has not changed—nor will the Great Relativity Revolution of the next hundred years succeed in changing—the unchanged and unchangeable. Yet for some minds it has changed some large aspects of the changeable, and has given them a new conception, as “right” or as “wrong” as the conceptions from the caveman onwards that preceded it, of finite things: how these are likely, though not certain, to behave; what is their most feasible physical future. According to this conception, though the Transcendental may be there, It will not, cannot, intervene irregularly or arbitrarily in the ordered working of the given universe; in particular It will not, by miracle or deed magical, intervene in the even tenor of any finite entity, such as our own particular Milky Way or solar system or planet—amongst other things to destroy it suddenly. Cannot and will not. The earth and its creatures will perish, as they arose, as part of the normal course of apparent physical nature; by so-styled natural ends, not miraculous.
There is no necessary conflict. Belief in the supernatural nature of the universe need not preclude belief in the natural end of this world. Belief in aboriginal God, or in the soul as a phenomenon not born of nor bound up with matter, or in unseen worlds beyond the seen one, need not exclude the expectation that the seen one will end, or appear to end, in one of such six ways as set forth in these six chapters—by cold or crash or comet or whichever humanly predictable, materially describable, agency it may be. Not everyone unbelieving in Time is indifferent to what will seem to take place within its apparent limits. Not everyone convinced of spiritual reality, or of some unknown form of reality beyond spiritual reality, is convinced that physical reality is meaningless and the disappearance of its familiar shapes a fact of no interest, a phenomenon of no probability. Not everyone persuaded that only mind exists is untouched by the manner of matter’s going. Not every Dreamer scorns how the Dream will fade. Though God is God, and the Mystery unconjecturable, how and when It will put off its present garments is not unworthy man’s conjecture, a speculation with which natural science, as much as any other scheme or system, may profitably and prophetically concern herself.
Her type of guess may be the right one, and frost, flame or flood the end, the end of soul with body; the conclusion, together with the world visible, of the world invisible of good and evil, joy and suffering, love and terror, that has filled and formed every heart that has beaten or yet shall beat.
Or the magical doubters, and by their side the fundamentalists of all faiths and ages, and maybe (when the Wheel of Knowledge turns full circle) the new philosophers the newer physics will give birth to: these others may be right. Science may be a set of symbols corresponding to no reality whatever; natural law a phantasm unreliable from one hour to the next even within its own imaginary world; cause and effect, time and space, a vicious round of false notions which can never explain a world, leave alone a universe, into which they do not enter; the universe, made up of something beyond both soul and matter, a thing unpredicable and unpredictable in terms of either—as God ineffable, or as Chaos finally irrational. The little world we think we see may have subsisted and subsist forever and forever; the whole cosmos vanish tonight.
When?
Fear deferred maketh the heart sick.
When the loved one, the one lover, lies in peril, the clutching dread that precedes is crueller than the long sorrow that follows.
And as terror of things to come is more than all grief for things gone past, so time, whether past or to come, is more terrible than space, Eternity more awful than the abyss. Who would not rather know—rather not know—when he will die than how or where he will die?
And as for ourselves and our beloved, so likewise with our qualms for the world. Man has ever concerned himself more passionately with the hour than with the way of destruction.
Which problem, if it holds greater interest, holds also greater difficulty. Surmise now moves from the humdrum sphere of matter into the wild realm of number, there to cower among kabbalistic patterns of fixed dates and patternless rows of cold zeros, or among the terrors, beyond all designs and digits, of the dateless zeroless Everlasting. How? was a hard query with many answers. Each of these adds its own complications to the questions When? Soon or late? What notice? At what stage of humanity’s career? Each several mode of the world’s ending brings several guesses at its time. The possibilities are added and multiplied, like the Biblical sums and astronomical ciphers themselves.
This Year
The end has endlessly been predicted for a given year, named and numbered.
Such predictions cannot altogether be classed with those of a near end rather than a distant, because the predicted date has not, when predicted, always been a near one. From another standpoint such predictions must be classed apart: in their support, almost alone, arguments from physical science are not invoked; today, as in the past, they are the unaided work of those in fee to the magic of numbers, whom if Science is not called upon to help, nor can she hinder. At the ultimate
