If no Reason, has it reasons?
That mankind, its climax, might be achieved? That the power of the devil should be shown forth? That the glory of the Lord shall be revealed? Some elysian goal, unrevealed, unrevealing, unrevealable? Or no reason, no purpose? Ideas from the trap.
Is the Universe alive?
Conscious, in supernal analogy to our kind of consciousness? Do earth and sun in dying have agony? Does consciousness accompany all material change: rock decaying, comet frittering, moons forming, stars crashing? Does Space suffer; does Number feel? Does the world that comprises them all know that it is alive, feel that it is alive, look inwards, and backwards and forwards, at its holistic Self? Is it fighting for its life, as we all fight? Are we, as we fight for our lives, it fighting for its? If alive, will it die?
It is not conscious, nor unconscious. It is not suffering, nor unsuffering. It is not alive, nor dead. It is not there.
Is the Universe Time?
In Orphic cosmogony it was Chronos who laid the world-egg. For Heraclitus, Time was like an eternal river, and that river the world. By one latter-day scheme of geometrical metaphysics, point-instants, offspring of Time out of Space, are the last realities; in each of these the instant is the mind of its point, and taking the whole Universe, which is the sum total of point-instants, Time is the mind of Space. Under some other philosophies, Time—or Space-Time—is as the field or framework within which Energy, for them the last reality, is exercising itself; the setting or background of the Universe. … What they mean, the strange doctors of the strange doctrines—idealist and realist, objective and subjective, physical and metaphysical, mathematical and psychological—who tug at the mantle of Chronos and send his scythe swerving through nightmare, what they tell: who knows? They tell nothing of what Time is.
It is not. Who shall discover it? Did it begin? Will it end?—Time flies. Who shall put plummets upon its flying feet? If tonight it should go ten times swifter or ten times slower, who would know? The properties it would have if it existed—unity, simultaneity, omneity—these it has not. Great Nebula in Orion is seen as it was a thousand centuries ago, not as it is now; as it is now, it will be seen (if any shall see) a thousand centuries ahead. The brightest stars and biggest nebulae of all are not yet perceived, whose light has not yet reached us; or the dimmest stars may be the nearest, seen through space backwards. But no star, as no other thing, has ever been seen as it is. There is no is; only a timeless becoming. There is no Time: only times and times. Time is a deduction, a derivation, a delusion; a trick on the trickster; a prisoner in prisoners’ minds.
Is the Universe infinite?
Finite or infinite, both are inconceivable. Brains nor hearts can imagine neither edge nor rim, end nor beginning; nor can imagine the world without margin or limit, without beginning or end. Both are totally equally irrevocably inconceivable.
If it be infinite, then either cyclic or evolutionary. Either the same heavens and the same earth shall return perpetually, or Behold! I create a new heaven and a new earth. Either each one of the possible combinations of lines or atoms or movements will one day recur, and again recur, and forever recur; the whole present configuration of the whole in every particular and detail reappear, disappear, again reappear, and so on through the endless nightmare ahead as it has appeared, disappeared, reappeared in the beginningless nightmare behind. This was the thought that enabled Socrates to abide Xanthippe’s tongue with patience, and without fear to face the hemlock. Or else, in the direction in which Time is going (its one open end, the future) the Universe is creating itself. From shapes inconceivable, lower than matter, to matter; from matter to life, life to mind, mind to man, the cosmos has walked onwards and worked upwards. The pilgrimage of being will continue: from man to God, God to shapes ineffable, beyond divinity. … This is the thought that comforts Socrates’ successors today.
If it be finite: then—spirit and matter being different aspects of the same thing, same movement, same finite contents—the law of death and degradation must apply to both. Physical entropy will include psychical entropy, matter-death spirit-death. It is the supernatural stalemate, the Wärmetod of Souls.
Is the Universe old?
If thus finite, is it nearing its end?
Of all the matter that must once have filled it, the greater part has spent itself in radiation, and only a little part remains. Calculate the light that there was in the beginning and the light that since has shone forth. Twenty-three parts of it have been beamed away, is the surmise, and a twenty-fourth part of it is still to spend. Twenty-three twenty-fourths of Time is over; it is eleven
