How the idea of infinite Space may affect a mind incomparably more powerful than my own, I cannot know;—neither can I divine the nature of certain problems which the laws of space-relation present to the geometrician. But when I try to determine the cause of the horror which that idea evokes within my own feeble imagination, I am able to distinguish different elements of the emotion,—particular forms of terror responding to particular ideas (rational and irrational) suggested by the revelations of science. One feeling—perhaps the main element of the horror—is made by the thought of being prisoned forever and ever within that unutterable Viewlessness which occupies infinite Space.
Behind this feeling there is more than the thought of eternal circumscription;—there is also the idea of being perpetually penetrated, traversed, thrilled by the Nameless;—there is likewise the certainty that no least particle of innermost secret Self could shun the eternal touch of It;—there is furthermore the tremendous conviction that could the Self of me rush with the swiftness of light,—with more than the swiftness of light,—beyond all galaxies, beyond durations of time so vast that Science knows no sign by which their magnitudes might be indicated,—and still flee onward, onward, downward, upward,—always, always,—never could that Self of me reach nearer to any verge, never speed farther from any centre. For, in that Silence, all vastitude and height and depth and time and direction are swallowed up: relation therein could have no meaning but for the speck of my fleeting consciousness,—atom of terror pulsating alone through atomless, soundless, nameless, illimitable potentiality.
And the idea of that potentiality awakens another quality of horror,—the horror of infinite Possibility. For this Inscrutable that pulses through substance as if substance were not at all,—so subtly that none can feel the flowing of its tides, yet so swiftly that no life-time would suffice to count the number of the oscillations which it makes within the fraction of one second,—thrills to us out of endlessness;—and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor; the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. To that phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a universe were equally facile: here it caresses the eye with the charm and illusion of color; there it bestirs into being a cluster of giant suns. All that human mind is capable of conceiving as possible (and how much also that human mind must forever remain incapable of conceiving?) may be wrought anywhere, everywhere, by a single tremor of that Abyss....
Is it true, as some would have us believe, that the fear of the extinction of self is the terror supreme?... For the thought of personal perpetuity in the infinite vortex is enough to evoke sudden trepidations that no tongue can utter,—fugitive instants of a horror too vast to enter wholly into consciousness: a horror that can be endured in swift black glimpsings only. And the trust that we are one with the Absolute—dim points of thrilling in the abyss of It—can prove a consoling faith only to those who find themselves obliged to think that consciousness dissolves with the crumbling of the brain.... It seems to me that few (or none) dare to utter frankly those stupendous doubts and fears which force mortal intelligence to recoil upon itself at every fresh attempt to pass the barrier of the Knowable. Were that barrier unexpectedly pushed back,—were knowledge to be suddenly and vastly expanded beyond its present limits,—perhaps we should find ourselves unable to endure the revelation....
Mr. Percival Lowell's astonishing book, "Mars," sets one to thinking about the results of being able to hold communication with the habitants of an older and a wiser world,—some race of beings more highly evolved than we, both intellectually and morally, and able to interpret a thousand mysteries that still baffle our science. Perhaps, in such event, we should not find ourselves able to comprehend the methods, even could we borrow the results, of wisdom older than all our civilization by myriads or hundreds of myriads of years. But would not the sudden advent of larger knowledge from some elder planet prove for us, by reason, of the present moral condition of mankind, nothing less than a catastrophe?—might it not even result in the extinction of the human species?...
The rule seems to be that the dissemination of dangerous higher knowledge, before the masses of a people are ethically prepared to receive it, will always be prevented by the conservative instinct; and we have reason to suppose (allowing for individual exceptions) that the power to gain higher knowledge is developed only as the moral ability to profit by such knowledge is evolved. I fancy that if the power of holding intellectual converse with other worlds could now serve us, we should presently obtain it. But if, by some astonishing chance,—as by the discovery, let us suppose, of some method of ether-telegraphy,—this power were prematurely acquired, its exercise would in all probability be prohibited.... Imagine, for example, what would have happened during the Middle Ages to the person guilty of discovering means to communicate with the people of a neighboring planet! Assuredly that inventor and his apparatus and his records would have been burned; every trace and memory of his labors would have been extirpated. Even to-day the sudden discovery of truths unsupported by human experience, the sudden revelation of facts totally opposed to existing convictions, might evoke some frantic revival of superstitious terrors,—some religious panic-fury that would strangle science, and replunge the world in mental darkness for a thousand years.