It would have been a wonderful spectacle for the thinker to contemplate the great work of all those beings. In passion or indifference, in pleasure or pain, in laughter or tears, in movement or repose, they lived; fighting, forgiving; accusing, forgetting; loving, hating; being born and dying; drawn into the fatal whirlpool; blindly succeeding each other through the generations and centuries, not knowing what gave them birth; ignorant of the fate in store for individuals and souls; playthings of that Nature which forms worlds and beings, stars and atoms, centuries and minutes, like soap-bubbles blown by a child into the air; and all plunging into the sea, like those whirls of sand which the desert wind raises and blows along in the typhoon or the breeze. It is the same spectacle as that which the earth offers to-day; living multitudes fighting for life and knowing only death.
The thought which must strike us most in our retrospective contemplation is that at that time the Earth did not exist. Not one of those human beings who live now, who will live in the future, or who have lived in the past, were then thought of. Nothing of all that now exists around us existed then. Yet in those ancient worlds which have disappeared long ago, the humanities which animated them had their vivid history, with flourishing cities, fights and struggles, laws and law-courts, judges of spiritual things, historians, economists, politicians, theologians, literary men, who took pains to tell the true from the false and to write down conscientiously what they, too, called “universal history.” For them, all creation stopped in their era and in their place; for all of them, creation was finished; the rest of the universe and of limitless eternity was lost in insignificance in comparison with what they called the “Present.” They never thought of the eternity which had already passed before them, nor of the eternity which would come after them.
They lived, learned or ignorant, famous or obscure, rich or poor, opulent or miserable, religious or sceptical, they all lived as if their era would never come to an end. Some of them, without losing a minute, amassed a fortune which their heirs hastened to dissipate; some spent their time in dreams and contemplations without thinking of the morrow. In one place there would be battalions inflaming the populace with their patriotic shouts; in another loving couples united their souls in mystery. Under the pressure of what they believed to be affairs of imperative importance, driven by the attractions of pleasure or borne on the wings of ambition, the inhabitants of that ancient world, like those of ours, flung themselves into the whirlpool of life. They, like ourselves, had days of glory and of sorrow; they had their ’89 and ’93, their Austerlitz and Waterloo, and political drama had its 18th Brumaire and its 2nd of December. Thus recently on our own Earth shone the life of Babylon, of Thebes, of Memphis, of Nineveh, of Carthage, the glory of Semiramis, Sesostris, Solomon, Alexander, Cambyses, and Cæsar; and to-day the silence of funeral solitude reigns supreme over the ruins of the palaces and temples, in the slumber of the invading night. In the history of the universe it is not only peoples, kingdoms, and empires which have disappeared, but it is whole worlds, groups of worlds, archipelagoes of planets, visible universes!
For eternity did not begin, it was never begun. The forces of Nature have never been inactive. For Nature itself, our measures of time, our conceptions of duration, do not exist. She has no past and no future, but a perpetual present. She remains immutable throughout her incessant manifestations and transformations. We pass away; She remains.
One can hardly think without terror of the innumerable beings which have lived on the worlds now lost, of all the leading spirits who have thought, acted, guided humanity in the path of progress, light, and liberty. One cannot think of Platos, Pascals, and Newtons of the vanished worlds without asking what has become of them. It is easy to reply that that is nothing, that they died as they were born, that all is dust and returns to dust. It is an easy answer, but it is not satisfying.
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Certainly, nobody can be so foolish as to claim to have found a solution of the great mystery. For treating those profound problems of eternity and infinity, we are about in the position of ants attempting to gain a knowledge of the history of France. In spite of all their mental gifts, which have indeed been fully recognised, in spite of their goodwill, their gallant attempts and all their efforts, it is quite probable that they would not get beyond the history of their ant-heap and would not arrive at any reasonable conclusions concerning human beings and their affairs. To them, naturally, the proprietors of the woods and fields are the ants, and the plant-lice domesticated by them. And the parasites of the Earth are those inedible insects which interfere with them. Do they know that birds exist? It is doubtful. As regards men, they do not know of their existence, though it may be that the ants in civilised countries have in their antennal language an expression corresponding to the idea of “sugar-maker,” or cook, or confectioner, or for some implacable enemy such as a gardener. But even if they suspected our existence, they could not form any idea about the human race or its history but—the ideas of ants.
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It would no doubt be as useless as it is foolish to lose ourselves in the nebulosity of metaphysics to attain a solution which will escape us for ever. But it is no doubt a proper subject for the exercise of our mental faculties to think of this particular aspect of creation: Time; to think that from all eternity earths inhabited like ours have floated in the light of their suns, that from all eternity there have been humanities enjoying the pleasures of life, and that from all eternity the end of the world has sounded on the hoary timepiece of destiny, burying in turn the universes and their inhabitants in the tomb of annihilation and oblivion. For it is impossible for us to conceive a commencement which was not preceded by an eternity of inaction, and as far as the observational sciences can take us, they show us forces in perpetual activity.
If infinite space dazzles us by its limitless immensity, an eternity without a beginning and without end arises, still more formidable perhaps, before our terrified gaze. The voices of the past speak to us from the abyss: they speak of the future.