The minute bacterial corruption now assumed a gross chemistry. The
gases of putrefaction forming in the brain and interpenetrating it
were represented in his consciousness by the denizens of the pustules
becoming formless and impersonal--Arthur had not yet fathomed the abyss.
Creeping, winding, embracing, the Universe enfolded him, violated him
with a nameless and intimate contamination, involved his being in a
more suffocating terror.
Now and again it drowned that consciousness in a gulf which his thought
could not express to me; and indeed the first and least of his torments
is utterly beyond human expression.
It was a woe ever expanded, ever intensified, by each vial of wrath.
Memory increased, and understanding grew; the imagination had equally
got rid of limit.
What this means who can tell? The human mind cannot really
appreciate numbers beyond a score or so; it can deal with numbers
by ratiocination, it cannot apprehend them by direct impression. It
requires a highly trained intelligence to distinguish between fifteen
and sixteen matches on a plate without counting them. In death this
limitation is entirely removed. Of the infinite content of the Universe
every item was separately realized. The brain of Arthur had become
equal in power to that attributed by theologians to the Creator; yet
of executive power there was no seed. The impotence of man before
circumstance was in him magnified indefinitely, yet without loss of
detail or of mass. He understood that The Many was The One without
losing or fusing the conception of either. He was God, but a God
irretrievably damned; a being infinite, yet limited by the nature of
things, and that nature solely compact of loathliness.