They base it also on expectation of a future race well able to exploit those methods. But man may move backwards not forwards intellectually, or aside up some pudding-bag of futile and feckless being. He may know less than we do now, or quite different things—that show him the future in a light too bright or too dark for our eyes, or for his. All present facts may be seen as strange fancies, nightmare guesses of a race of dolls, by our sons the supermen; or blankly forgotten, by the beasts we shall breed. This only is certain: that, if there are still any, the living things on the planet a few thousand or few million years from now will be lower than gods and not lower than stones; creatures who may have no more knowledge of cause and result than have the fishes, or have defied all results save the last and divined all Causes save the First.
We can have no foreknowledge of their foreknowledge; no expectation of long expectation. One year the end will be next year; and that year may be the next.
Some Time
Twentieth century’s persuasion—the End far and wide—is founded on five chief things.
First, on sheer optimism, in its turn founded partly, if unconsciously, on the present trend of teaching and preaching, itself founded partly on the comfortable situation of most folk who preach and teach. Were the world’s past described by the downtrodden or the suffering or the hungry, by cargo of slave-ship or girls of a brothel, by children of galleys or gallows or caste-bridehood or race-hatred or festering slum, it would wear different hues and darker; were the world’s future descried by the world’s victims—the world’s majority—it would be coloured by less joy of continuance. Long life for the world is predicted by a small and special class who find its life worth prolonging.
Second, on a kind of logic akin to but less ignoble than such complacency; which, well aware of his sorrowful past and suffering present, yet has faith in man’s ultimate destiny and regards it as against all meaning and all reason that he should be cut off before the flower of his age—so reasonless, so meaningless as to be beyond conception. Near doom is not conceivable; so doom is far.
Third, on the new sense of time created by, and that has created, the new theories of time’s nature. What they say, the strange priests with the strange names—Weyl and Cassirer; Bergson, Bolzano; Einstein, Minkowski; Poincaré, Palágyi—who tug at the mantle of Chronos and send his scythe swerving through nightmare, what they mean: who knows? They themselves? their warring acolytes? the chronic hierophants who would harmonize, synthesize, their magic and discordant speech? Perhaps none of these. But plain men scent the plain upshot: that through their words and their worship the old God’s life is made longer, Time’s boundaries pushed backward, world’s respite increased.
Fourthly, and fundamentally, on a consideration one by one of the various manners of the end. A distant answer to When? is, by Probability, deduced from the different answers to How? The most probable of these are those probably most remote.
To each of the Ways allot its percentage of likelihood:
| Mode of World’s End | Percentage of Likelihood |
|---|---|
| Comet | 1 |
| Fire | 2 |
| Water | 1 |
| Drought | 15 |
| Cold | 80 |
| Crash | 1 |
This is a very unsatisfactory table. To avoid fractions, proportionately too many marks, from the scientist’s point of view, are doubtless given to the ways he deems least likely. To ignore for the moment the distinction between man’s end and the globe’s, the figures apply—where there would be a difference between the two—to the former, Collision thus getting one mark instead of (say) ninety-nine. The supernatural end, God, is excluded as not amenable to natural percentages. All the figures are quite arbitrary. Fire, for instance, is particularly unassessable at this juncture of particular doubt and dispute as to the sun’s age and constitution and source of self-renewal. Cold and Drought are really one. Water’s scarce worth a fraction. Comet is claptrap. … It is a very unsatisfactory table.
It could hardly be otherwise. The very ways being guesses, so much the more so their comparative likelihood. Each way had many variants, each variant many variants as to time. One way is bound up with other ways, often inextricably. If (under Cold) the earth’s oceans freeze or (under Drought) disappear before the moon’s return (under Crash) upon us, then tidal friction will abate, and the moon’s advance be arrested; and there will be no such Crash, and Cold it will be. If, on the contrary, the moon makes haste and comes before the seas are either frozen or dried up, then Collision has it. …
The broad result is not affected. It is unequivocal. Comet, Fire and Crash, the three accidents—which, being the least precisely predictable, cannot be refused therefore the theoretical possibility of coming soon—manage all three together to reach a paltry 4 percent. No less than 96 percent is shared by Water, Drought and Cold, which should come upon us in a far future only. Drought-Cold, the composite end, that according to almost all latter-day conjecture, we are bound for, is, according to almost all present-day assessment, not less than thousands of millions of years away. The answer to When? as based on the answers to How? puts early consummation beyond the pale of all human plausibility.
Fifthly, and most persuasively, on the companion belief that the beginning is far away.
Here abandon intensive figure-play for extensive, the humble sums and subtractions of the older prophecy for the bold zero-games of the new. If the calculations are remoter from lay understanding, more fantastic, more visionary, they offer
