THE TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY
1
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.
2
This universe thus conceived would be, if not intelligible, at least
admissible by our reason; but in that universe float billions of worlds
limited by space and time. They are born, they die and they are born
again. They form part of the whole; and we see, therefore, that parts of
that which has neither beginning nor end themselves begin and end. We,
in fact, know only those parts; and they are of a number so infinite
that in our eyes they fill all infinity. That which is going nowhere
teems with that which appears to be going somewhere. That which has
always known what it wants, or will never learn, seems to be eternally
experimenting with more or less ill-success. At what goal is it aiming,
since it is already there? Everything that we discover in that which
could not possibly have an object looks as though it were pursuing one
with inconceivable ardour; and the mind that animates what we see in
that which should know everything and possess itself seems to know
nothing and to seek itself without intermission. Thus all that is
apparent to our senses in infinity gainsays that which our reason is
compelled to ascribe to it. According as we fathom it, we come to
understand how deep is our want of understanding; and, the more we
strive to penetrate the two incomprehensible problems that stand face to
face, the more they contradict each other.
3
What will become of us amid all this confusion? Shall we leave the
finite wherein we dwell to be swallowed up in this or the other
infinite? In other words, shall we end by absorption in the infinite
which our reason conceives, or shall we remain eternally in that which
our eyes behold, that is to say, in numberless changing and ephemeral
worlds? Shall we never leave those worlds which seem doomed to die and
to be reborn eternally, to enter at last into that which, from all
eternity, can neither have been born nor have died and which exists
without either future or past? Shall we one day escape, with all that
surrounds us, from this unhappy speculation, to find our way at last
into peace, wisdom, changeless and boundless consciousness, or into
hopeless unconsciousness? Shall we have the fate which our senses
foretell, or that which our intelligence demands? Or are both senses and
intelligence only illusions, puny implements, vain weapons of an hour,
which we never intended to examine or defy the universe? If there really
be a contradiction, is it wise to accept it and to deem impossible that
which we do not understand, seeing that we understand almost nothing? Is
truth not at an immeasurable distance from these inconsistencies which
appear to us enormous and irreducible and which, doubtless, are of no
more importance than the rain that falls upon the sea?
4
But, even to our poor understanding to-day, the discrepancy between the
infinity conceived by our reason and that perceived by our senses is
perhaps more apparent than real. When we say that, in a universe that
has existed since all eternity, every experiment, every possible
combination has been made; when we declare that there is no chance that
what has not taken place in the uncountable past can take place in the
uncountable future, our imagination perhaps attributes to the infinity
of time a preponderance which it cannot possess. In truth, all that
infinity contains must be as infinite as the time at its disposal; and
the chances, encounters and combinations that lie therein have not been
exhausted in the eternity that has gone before us any more than they
could be in the eternity that will come after us. The infinity of time
is no vaster than the infinity of the substance of the universe. Events,
forces, chances, causes, effects, phenomena, fusions, combinations,
coincidences, harmonies, unions, possibilities, lives are represented in
it by innumerous numbers that entirely fill a bottomless and vergeless
abyss where they have been shaken together from what we call the
beginning of the world that had no beginning and where they will be
stirred up until the end of a world that will have no end. There is,
therefore, no climax, no changelessness, no immovability. It is probable
that the universe is seeking and finding itself every day, that it has
not become entirely conscious and does not yet know what it wants. It is
possible that its ideal is still veiled by the shadow of its immensity;
it is also possible that experiments and chances are following one upon
the other in unimaginable worlds, compared wherewith all those which we
see on starry nights are no more than a pinch of gold-dust in the ocean
depths. Lastly, if either be true, it is also true that we ourselves, or
what remains of us—it matters not—will profit one day by those
experiments and those chances. That which has not yet happened may
suddenly supervene; and the next state, with the supreme wisdom which
will recognize and be able to establish that state, is perhaps ready to
arise from the clash of circumstances. It would not be at all
astonishing if the consciousness of the universe, in the endeavour to
form itself, had not yet encountered the combination of necessary
chances and if human thought were actually supporting one of those
decisive chances. Here there is a hope. Small as man and his brain may
appear, they have exactly the value of the most enormous forces that
they are able to conceive, since there is neither great nor small in the
immeasurable; and, if our body equalled the dimensions of all the worlds
which our eyes can see, it would have exactly the same weight and the
same importance as compared with the universe that it has to-day. The
mind alone perhaps occupies in infinity a space which comparisons do not
reduce to nothing.
5
For the rest, if everything must be said, at the cost of constantly and
shamelessly contradicting one’s self in the dark, and to return to the
first supposition, the idea of possible progress, it is extremely
probable that this again is one of those childish disorders of our brain
which prevent us from seeing the thing that is. It is quite as probable,
as we have seen above, that there never was, that there never will be
any progress, because there could not be a goal. At most there may occur
a few ephemeral combinations which, to our poor eyes, will seem happier
or more beautiful than others. Even so we think gold more beautiful than
the mud in the street, or the flower in a splendid garden happier than
the stone at the bottom of a drain; but all this, obviously, is of no
importance, has no corresponding reality and proves nothing in
particular.
The more we reflect upon it, the more pronounced is the infirmity of our
intelligence which cannot succeed in reconciling the idea of progress
and even the idea of experiment with the supreme idea of infinity.
Although nature has been incessantly and indefatigably repeating herself
before our eyes for thousands of years, reproducing the same trees and
the same animals, we cannot contrive to understand why the universe
indefinitely recommences experiments that have been made billions of
times. It is inevitable that, in the innumerable combinations that have
been and are being made in termless time and boundless space, there have
been and still are millions of planets and consequently millions of
human races exactly similar to our own, side by side with myriads of
others more or less different from it. Let us not say to ourselves that
it would require an unimaginable concourse of circumstances to reproduce
a globe like to our earth in every respect. We must remember that we are
in the infinite and that this unimaginable concourse must necessarily
take place in the innumerousness which we are unable to imagine. Though
it need billions and billions of cases for two features to coincide,
those billions and billions will encumber infinity no more than would a
single case. Place an infinite number of worlds in an infinite number of
infinitely diverse circumstances: there will always be an infinite
number for which those circumstances will be alike; if not, we should be
setting bounds to our idea of the universe, which would forthwith become
more incomprehensible still. From the moment that we insist sufficiently
upon that thought, we necessarily arrive at these conclusions. If they
have not struck us hitherto, it is because we never go to the farthest
point of our imagination. Now the farthest point of our imagination is
but the beginning of reality and gives us only a small, purely human
universe, which, vast as it may seem, dances in the real universe like
an apple on the sea. I repeat, if we do not admit that thousands of
worlds, similar in all points to our own, in spite of the billions of
adverse chances, have always existed and still exist to-day, we are
sapping the foundations of the only possible conception of the universe
or of infinity.
6
Now how is it that those millions of exactly similar human races, which
from all time suffer what we have suffered and are still suffering,
profit us nothing, that all their experiences and all their schools have
had no influence upon our first efforts and that everything has to be
done again and begun again incessantly?
As we see, the two theories balance each other. It is well to acquire by
degrees the habit of understanding nothing. There remains to us the
faculty of choosing the less gloomy of the two or persuading ourselves
that the mists of the other exist only in our brain. As that strange
visionary, William Blake, said:
“Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.”
Let us add that it is not possible for it to know anything other than
itself. What we do not know would be enough to create the world afresh;
and what we do know cannot add one moment to the life of a fly. Who can
tell but that our chief mistake lies in believing that an intelligence,
were it an intelligence thousands of times as great as ours, directs the
universe? It may be a force of quite another nature, a force that
differs as widely from that on which our brain prides itself as
electricity, for instance, differs from the wind that blows. That is why
it is fairly probable that our mind, however powerful it become, will
always grope in mystery. If it be certain that everything in us must
also be in nature, because everything comes to us from her, if the mind
and all the logic which it has placed at the culminating point of our
being direct or seem to direct all the actions of our life, it by no
means follows that there is not in the universe a force greatly superior
to thought, a force having no imaginable relation to the mind, a force
which animates and governs all things according to other laws and of
which nothing is found in us but almost imperceptible traces, even as
almost imperceptible traces of thought are all that can be found in
plants and minerals.
In any case, there is nothing here to make us lose courage. It is
necessarily the human illusion of evil, ugliness, uselessness and
impossibility that is to blame. We must wait not for the universe to be
transformed, but for our intelligence to expand or to take part in the
other force; and we must maintain our confidence in a world which knows
nothing of our conceptions of purpose and progress, because it doubtless
has ideas whereof we have no idea, a world, moreover, which could
scarcely wish itself harm.
7
“These are but vain speculations,” it will be said. “What matters, after
all, the idea which we form of those things which belong to the
unknowable, seeing that the unknowable, were we a thousand times as
intelligent as we are, is closed to us for ever and that the idea which
we form of it will never have any value?”
That is true; but there are degrees in our ignorance of the unknowable;
and each of those degrees marks a triumph of the intelligence. To
estimate more and more completely the extent of what it does not know is
all that man’s knowledge can hope for. Our idea of the unknowable was
and always will be valueless, I admit; but it nevertheless is and will
remain the most important idea of mankind. All our morality, all that is
in the highest degree noble and profound in our existence has always
been based on this idea devoid of real value. To-day, as yesterday, even
though it be possible to recognize more clearly that it is too
incomplete and relative ever to have any actual value, it is necessary
to carry it as high and as far as we can. It alone creates the only
atmosphere wherein the best part of ourselves can live. Yes, it is the
unknowable into which we shall not enter; but that is no reason for
saying to ourselves:
“I am closing all the doors and all the windows; henceforth, I shall
interest myself only in things which my everyday intelligence can
compass. Those things alone have the right to influence my actions and
my thoughts.”
Where should we arrive at that rate? What things can my intelligence
compass? Is there a thing in this world that can be separated from the
inconceivable? Since there is no means of eliminating that
inconceivable, it is reasonable and salutary to make the best of it and
therefore to imagine it as stupendously vast as we are able. The gravest
reproach that can be brought against the positive religions and notably
against Christianity is that they have too often, if not in theory, at
least in practice, encouraged such a narrowing of the mystery of the
universe. By broadening it, we broaden the space wherein our mind will
move. It is for us what we make it: let us then form it of all that we
can reach on the horizon of ourselves. As for the mystery itself, we
shall, of course, never reach it; but we have a much greater chance of
approaching it by facing it and going whither it draws us than by
turning our backs upon it and returning to that place where we well know
that it no longer is. Not by diminishing our thoughts shall we diminish
the distance that separates us from the ultimate truths; but by
enlarging them as much as possible we are sure of deceiving ourselves as
little as possible. And the loftier our idea of the infinite, the more
buoyant and the purer becomes the spiritual atmosphere wherein we live
and the wider and deeper the horizon against which our thoughts and
feelings stand out, the horizon which is all their life and which they
inspire.
“Perpetually to construct ideas requiring the utmost stretch of our
faculties,” wrote Herbert Spencer, “and perpetually to find that such
ideas must be abandoned as futile imaginations, may realize to us more
fully than any other course, the greatness of that which we vainly
strive to grasp.... By continually seeking to know and being continually
thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing,
we may keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom
and our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as
the Unknowable.”
8
Whatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract,
absolute and perfect infinity—the changeless, immovable infinity which
has attained perfection and which knows everything, to which our reason
tends—or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence,
undeniable here below, of our senses—the infinity which seeks itself,
which is still evolving and not yet established—it behoves us above all
to foresee in it our fate, which, for that matter, must, in either case,
end by absorption in that very infinity.