What then will come to pass? First, covering all men, a slow surge of fear—fear, with Love and self-love, the third director of men’s actions. When fear rises self-love rises with it, and Love goes under. In hearts stripped naked by terror, the beast will hack through and triumph forth; their death before their eyes, their faces turned monstrous with their hearts, cruelly they will fight to get or keep for themselves alone the best places or best chances (if against Cold not the Star, the last stocks of preserved sunlight or synthetic warmth), cruelly rejoicing in the suffering of those whom they deprive or despoil. From craftier hearts “What must I do to be saved?”—all fear-moments are religious moments—will go up in clouds of servile prayer to the advancing star (the dying one), with incense of propitiatory virtue and pious works. In a few heavenly hearts Love will stand firm and victorious, in might of self-sacrifice giving up its share of scant coolness (scant heat) unto others. In the few maddest hearts will shine exultation, glad welcome to death as victory, Annihilation as the Bride. Until, as the heat (cold) waxes, and pain and disease oust (numb) even fear, and the horror of physical suffering blots out even the mental horror at the world’s fate. …
Except—who knows? Who knows what happens, as he dies, in the heart of another? Some go fearing, some cursing; some in peace, some in pride; some struggling passionately to live, some knowing that there is nothing better for a man than that he should die; some beholding the darkness, and some the King in His beauty. According to the manner of his individual soul and according to the manner of the general end, so amid these various ways for man’s choosing will he choose to die.
Foreknowledge must be his comfort. By large increase of memory and foresight, by calculus more powerful and machines more marvellous, by telescopes to watch each sunspot on each farthest star, by microscopes to watch each proton and electron at work or play, by subtleties of mind and contrivances of matter that at the last instead of merely adumbrating will seek to direct the destinies of earth and of heaven, by all these and by God’s pity—whichever the way, whatever the end, it will be foretold in time.
In time for what?
Never
World not longeval, but eternal. World without end.
There is a halfway house, a high intermediate possibility: of a termination so remote, so far beyond the proudest chain of ciphers in astronomy as, though short of eternity, to be for the human mind almost indistinguishable from it.
Brahma divided the time of the world into Days, each Day consisting of 2,000 divine periods, each divine period consisting of 12,000 spiritual years, each spiritual year consisting of 360 terrestrial years of 360 days each. A Day thus contains 3,110,400,000,000 days. How many Days will there be?
Buddha divided the time of the world into Great Periods, and each Great Period into four Incalculables. Asked the number of years in an Incalculable, he replied: So great that no writing of zeros would ever attain it. A Cingalese doctor, glossing Gautama, estimates that if once in a hundred years an iron mountain were touched lightly by a light muslin veil, the length of an Incalculable is the length of time required for that veil to wear away that mountain. Unmindful of the master’s warning, a Burmese horologist lays zeros together, and his Incalculable estimate—at once the most liberal and the most precise that we have—is two hundred septillions of miles of noughts. For a Great Period multiply by four. How many Great Periods may there not be?
Likewise modern lovers of number have imagined the time of the world as of a magnitude that bedwarfs the astronomer’s billions. A billion written out contains but thirteen digits, a million billion but six zeros more; there are the numbers containing a billion of the zeros themselves, and the staircase-numbers a billion digits of times yet bigger. The total number of the atoms that make up this earth contains but some sixty noughts; that make up the whole universe of matter, as today judged finite in space, some four hundred; that made up Archimedes’ cosmos, as described in the Psammites, the Sand-Reckoner, some fourscore thousand. Number transcending matter, the total of seconds in the universe not of space but of time may run to a sum decillions of staircase-numbers greater than those fourscore thousands of noughts, to a figure so flagrant that no way or system of human words or symbols is able to show forth or dimly shadow it. How many separate decillions of those decillions may there not be?
It is vanity. In His sight all the noughts round all the universes are a noontide. They will pass. Eternity ahead of them will be no briefer than before.
Not, like these divisional schemes, short of Eternity, but a special way of conceiving it, is the World of Ages or Cycles; Palingesia perpetual. The doctrine has had its finite variants: so many deaths, so many rebirths, and at last the final end. But Arabs, Arawaks, Aztecs have implied the eternity of the series. The Mayas of Yucatan—the great American people—taught that there had been four past Ages or Suns: the Sun of Earth, ended by the Great Drought; the Sun of Fire, ended by the Great Conflagration; the Sun of Air, ended by the Great Hurricane; the Sun of Water, ended by the Great Flood—in world tradition generally the last general world disaster—and indeed the whole sequence is an accurate account of what has happened, if not
