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Let us turn our thoughts towards it. The problem goes beyond humanity and embraces all things. It is possible, I think, to view infinity under two distinct aspects. Let us contemplate the first of them. We are plunged in a universe that has no limits in space or time. It can neither go forward nor go back. It has no origin. It never began, nor will it ever end. The myriads of years behind it are even as the myriads which it has yet to unroll. From all time it has been at the boundless centre of the days. It could have no aim, for, if it had one, it would have attained it in the infinity of the years that lie behind us; besides, that aim would be outside itself and, if there were anything outside it, it would be bounded by that thing and would cease to be infinity. It is not making for anywhere, for it would have arrived there; consequently, all that the worlds within its pale, all that we ourselves do can have no influence upon it. All that it will do it has done. All that it has not done remains undone because it can never do it. If it have no mind, it will never have one. If it have one, that mind has been at its climax from all time and will remain there, changeless and immovable. It is as young as it has ever been and as old as it will ever be. It has made in the past all the efforts and all the trials which it will make in the future; and, as all the possible combinations have been exhausted since what we cannot even call the beginning, it does not seem as if that which has not taken place in the eternity that stretches before our birth can happen in the eternity that will follow our death. If it have not become conscious, it will never become conscious; if it know not what it wishes, it will continue in ignorance, hopelessly, knowing all or knowing nothing and remaining as near its end as its beginning.
This is the gloomiest thought to which man can attain. So far, I do not think that its depths have been sufficiently sounded. If it were really irrefutable—and some may contend that it is—if it actually contained the last word of the great riddle, it would be almost impossible to live in its shadow. Naught save the certainty that our conceptions of time and space are illusive and absurd can lighten the abyss wherein our last hope would perish.