How? + 

The origin of the world is unknown. + 

When geological time begins, some short thousand million years ago, the earth is already a globe, in shape if not in surface much as now, whirling around a star little different if at all from our sun today; a body with its given size and substance, its allotted place and path in heaven. How it came there is unknown. + 

Knowing nothing, Man has variously and valiantly guessed. Seven chief guesses jostle for primacy. + 

The nebular. There was once a great fluid cloud or rotating chaos of fire, far-flung beyond the present orbit of Neptune. Gradually, through prodigious years, it cooled and condensed, at its dwindling fringes throwing off successive rings which became the several planets, while the main mass shrank to form our central sun. + 

The attractional. The cosmic cloud did not throw matter off, but attracted new matter from outside. These captured masses formed the planets; the nebula itself became the sun. + 

The meteoric. Millions of meteor-swarms moved nearer together, by progressive agglomeration and concretion formed themselves into solid earths, and by gravitational attraction were drawn within the orbit of one of the stars, our sun. + 

The tidal. There was once a great star, much greater than the sun now. A still greater star passed near, raised on our star a fierce tide, tore out of him a milliard-mile stream of gas. The outer portion of this stream receded, and split up into the fragments, or condensed into the drops, that are the earth and her sister worlds. + 

The collisional. Our parent star, most likely a dead star that had been wandering for countless dead years through the infinite, passed not hard by but crashed head on into another star, and in colossal conflagration flamed into new life, a glorious nova for Sirian glasses to behold. The main piece became the sun, small shattered bits the satellites. + 

The planetesimal. In his turbulent youth the ancestral star, whether lashed to tidal frenzy by some passing body or urged by radioactive excitement of his own, one day burst open the crust new-hardening upon him, and shot forth of his gaseous or fiery self; which particles, or planetesimals, by local convergence formed the planets. + 

The magical. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. + 

There are variants and combinations of all these guesses, and objections, mathematical or mystical, to all these guesses, and other guesses. In a word, nobody knows. We only know that a beginning our system must once have had. + 

And since, for the human mind as constituted, the future is even harder to divine than the past, the mode of the ending of the world is a still wider and wilder field for surmise than the mode of its beginning. Nobody knows. We only know that an end there must one day be. + 

Whatever had a beginning must have an end. It is hard to realize and harder to relish: but the hour will come when the fields and forests, the lands and oceans, the earth and heaven, the whole seen world with man himself by whom it is seen, and all that man has made, the roads and the farms, the towers and the temples, the crowning cities, the glory and vainglory of kingdoms, will be no more, will dissolve into the elements from which they first arose, will vanish forever like a dream⁠—vanish because they are a dream. The race of man may go first or, as some conjecture, may outlive awhile the earth; or race and globe may perish jointly together. But die the world must, and the sides shall know it no more. + 

Hopes that by some miracle it might be spared are one with man’s same hopes of defeating death: hopes born of cowering fear or towering pride, and fulfilled for no man. + 

Whom casualty daily besets; the toll of hazard is high, every step forward by mechanical science increasing both the likelihood and the variety of murderous mischance. Who now can be smashed out of life not only as in the good old days by boulder or landslide, but by railway-train or motorcar or airship. Heat or fire may be his end, sunstroke or lightning; or to be struck by shot, or shell, or death-ray; or burned alive, when the spool flares, in dark palaces. Cold may be his portion: he may die of polar courage or of raimentless starvation in city streets. Water may finish him, drowning him in river or lake, wrecking his ship at sea; or desire of water, if he fall of thirst in the desert or fail in his multitudes through drought and following famine. + 

Whom sickness hourly destroys. This hurdle is stiffer; two-thirds of the field fail to take it. The catalogue too is longer; doctors have fought not more bravely to reduce the numbers borne off by disease than to increase the numbers of diseases. Few will survive the thousand maladies, and if they do there are always the ills man has added for himself to nature’s store: organized hunger which holds nearly half this best of all possible worlds in its cruel grip, and organized slaughter which in open battle alone has recently accounted for two million young men in one year, and will do far better⁠—next time. + 

A few, a tiny few, can hope to cover the Psalmist’s span, or beyond; a tiny span beyond. Butterfly lives for a summer, rat for a lustrum; horse for a score of years, Homo threescore and ten, eagle fourscore; salmon for a century, carp for two, tortoise, by slowness winning the race, for three. All are clocks wound up for a given maximum run, beyond which, should neither disease nor disaster have first overtaken them, none ever can go. + 

As with man, so with the earth: certainty tempered by variety. As the one dieth, so dieth the other. Some accident may surprise her: as, under the catastrophic theories of origin, tidal or collisional, it was accident which surprised her into life⁠—but for the chance star that passed that way, there would have been no solar system, no earth, no people, no you, no belovèd me. Some illness of the body may shorten her days. Her death may come through crashing comet or through sudden fire, through heat or through cold, through drought or through many waters. If, however, she elude all chance disasters and decline all modes of premature decay, if she live through till her ultimate possible hour, till the last astronomical inevitabilities that lie in wait, her extremity will be but postponed. She thinks: I shall be a lady forever. But she too is a clock. Time is not for her, and eternity against her. She too is a prey. The final death of this physical world is as sure as the death of the physical body of each one of the creatures upon it. + 

Here it will be asked in what way the world’s death is most likely to befall? and when? and what after?⁠—sorting and summarizing now with amusement, now with indifference, now with hope, now with bleak terror, the various guesses that have been given in attempted answer by other ages and by our own. + 

They are guesses, not knowledge. Like its origin, the destiny of the world is unknown. + 

Comet + 

From all antiquity, from the first yellow thinkers who compiled the great Chinese Celestial Atlas, and surely from darker and earlier tribes in whose hearts alone the wonder and the fear stood written, people dwelling on this earth have feared or wondered when they looked up at the familiar sky to behold there a serpent, sudden and fiery. + 

What is a comet? The old astrologers had one sort of answer; the new astronomers have another. + 

According to the latter, a comet is a heavenly body of debatable origin, gassy composition, and swift and various movement; distinguished indeed by certain minor eccentricities, but otherwise as much without the realm of wizardry and within the ordinary realm of ordered nature as the plain moon herself. It commonly consists of three parts: first, a brilliant central point, kernel or nucleus, starlike to the eye but not starlike in mass; second, surrounding the first and merging into it by misty gradations, a round nebulous haze known as the coma, brush, hair or chevelure. When a comet comes near the sun, this encircling mane heats and dilates, giving birth to the third part, the famous and frightening part, a long luminous appendix known as the streamer or sword or beard (Pliny records twelve shapes, with as many names) or, in modern parlance, as the tail. Many comets, however, have no tail; or only sometimes a tail. Others, proudly multi-caudal, display two tails or several: the six-branched splendour of 1744 preened like a golden peacock across the sky. But all have the nebulous haze or chevelure, and within it the kernel⁠—faery-light, gossamer-harmless say some, none so light or so harmless say others. + 

The known movements of known comets are also three: elliptic, and these, their ellipse round the sun accomplished, return to the same place after a period that astronomers can calculate, that Halley first calculated; parabolic, and those, coming from the farthest unknown on the arc of an infinite circle, merely salute the sun as they pass, and then fly on, never to return, to the farthest unknown again; or hyperbolic. + 

Why do they come? We have slight conjecture, beyond the charms of the sun, who when they draw near him gives them extra speed and light in generous measure. Charms that hold danger: for sometimes a universe-wandering or parabolic comet, lured into the solar system, passes near⁠—too near⁠—one of the greater planets, say Jupiter; and suffering the Jovian attraction, is constrained to stay near forever. Proud parabola becomes mean ellipse. He is the prisoner of our system⁠—for as long as our system lasts. + 

So in brief the modern stargazers, with their telescopes and spectroscopes, and astral photography and spectral analysis to aid them. + 

To seers of other days comets were not so interesting for what they were as for what they boded. They were objects of omen or presage, sometimes good but much more often bad, fiery destroyers that announced from the heavens fire and destruction on earth, swords of flame that foretokened war, red arrows that were arrows of famine. These dire predictions proved usually right. The old magi knew it long ago, Old Moore knows it now: that few are the days which pass by on this planet without some evil happenings somewhere. So bank on black; ’tis safe to prophesy ill. + 

Safe indeed! A giant rent the heavens, and Troy town fell. This one, delivers Aristotle, brought the Achaean earthquake; that one the storm of Corinth. One came and twenty years afterward another, and Mithridates of evil fame and poison-proof bowel was born and twenty years afterward was king. Then destinate Rome. One appeared to her in 48 BC⁠— + 

Non alias coelo ceciderunt plura sereno + 

Fulgura; nec diri toties arsere cometae⁠— + 

to usher in her bloodiest civil wars: Caesar and Pompey and those eighteen Rubicon years of slaughter. The proud visitant of 43 was Caesar’s own soul, triumphing through the worlds, ranging through heaven after reigning on earth, come back to tell Rome that with Julius gone she must accomplish her days of tribulation. Artful Augustus was well pleased, for if Julius were a god then his murderers were not homicides but deicides: a notion most helpful to the policy of artful Augustus, by whose gratitude was built a temple to that comet; under whose reign, as first Emperor of mankind, a star in the east proclaimed the young Redeemer of mankind; at whose death, perhaps from the selfsame asp that stung Cleopatra, flared up a star in the west, perhaps the selfsame star that was Caesar. + 

In the new Christian era, heavenly signs came thick and fast to declare its many disasters. A titan sword pointed down towards Jerusalem, and soon by Titus’ sword the Holy City was laid waste forever. At Christ’s birth-millenary a nine days’ terrible comet came searing the naked firmament of heaven to foretell the final end. The world survived indeed the 1000⁠—and thirty-three years later Christ’s death-millenary, the 1033⁠—but at the cost of such unexampled misery, pestilence and famine that many would have thought Finis Mundi the lesser evil. Thirty-three years later again, and in 1066 the famous Conquest Comet foretold the end of old England, this time truly. In the fourteenth century the Black Death was narrowly heralded. In the fifteenth a falciform monster, less sword than scimitar, proclaimed that the Muslims would conquer Europe. His Holiness the Pope denounced it, issued a bull against it, excommunicated it; then fearfully remembered and piously commanded the revival of an old disused prayer the Angelus, what time each day at noon the church bells should be rung, that the faithful everywhere might unite in synchronous prayer against both Coran and comet. But though the Angelus kept ringing, the Turks kept advancing, following the westward Star that had beckoned them on; kept advancing, they and the star, till together they took Byzantium, defiled St. Sophia, trod on her hundred crosses, and gave her, that was Christ’s, to Muhammad. + 

Between the sign and the disaster, the shape of the one and the nature of the other, there seems to have been no fixed relation. The only sure nexus the Middle Ages established was that between the fiery visitant and the fate of princes, between comets and lungs; Majesty’s death was announced in the firmament. A list of such announcements would be but a medieval Court Circular. Comets of special malignity, however, may be noted as having ushered to their graves Attila the Scourge of God, Valentinian the Pannonian, Louis the Debonair (innumerable prayers that the king prayed, fasts that he fasted, and churches that he built could postpone the end for only three short years), Richard the Lionhearted, Charles the Bold, and Ferdinand the Catholic. When a monarch chanced to die without the presaging serpent, then one had to be invented. So it was with Charlemagne and the flattery comet of 814 that no man ever saw. When, on the other hand, despite a monster fit for the Emperor himself, Gian Galeazzo Visconti (Earl of Virtue) refused to depart, the scandalized astrologers heaped upon him as he lay in bed such awful descriptions of its awfulness that he died in the end of fright. The astrologers said ’twas of the comet. + 

Side by side with these lesser auguries, throughout all the centuries men held the maximum belief that one day a comet would destroy the whole earth. + 

In lively contrast, a merry and medley minority, stand the optimist countries and individuals who have thought well of comets. Such were the Greeks, who unlike the sterner Romans deemed them the gods of Olympus sporting in friendly mood across the sky, this one Pallas Athene, that one golden Apollo. Timoleon of Corinth, undecided whether or no to set out on his Sicilian expedition, took a comet as a sign of heaven’s blessing and at once sailed forth for Syracuse, which despite divers hardships and perils he finally captured without the loss of a single man. Such are the viniculturists and vintners of these latter days, with the oenophiles in attendance obedient, who, seeing that one comet year after another proves likewise a good wine year, proclaim cause and effect: to the 1811 comet was ascribed the most famous of all famous ports and the premier vintage ever of the premier Grand Cru ever, the legendary cometary Château Lafite, while it was Donati’s of 1858 that gave that year’s grape its goodness. The Bordelais challenge tradition; they hope for comets. + 

There were the cynics also. In Rome. Such as Augustus; such as Seneca, who yet seems to tremble a trifle while he mocks; such as Vespasian, who, when told that one boded ill, replied “Yes, but for the king of the Parthians my enemy; I am bald, but he like the comet has a beard.” In London. Such as Queen Elizabeth, who, when they counselled her to stay indoors because a terror was in the sky, stood up, called “Open the window!” and marched forth to see. “Jacta est alea!” she added cryptically, after a good look skyward, and strode back into the room with a smile, and let us hope an oath also, to go on with her business and England’s; such as her right disloyal subject, Henry Howard (Earl of Northampton), who wrote his Preservative Against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies nearly four hundred years ago, and gave a devastating list of comets that had brought no unpleasant results in their train and another list, still more devastating, of unpleasant events that had occurred without comets to cause them. He was at once incarcerated in the Fleet. It may of course have been the Queen’s amorous jealousy; she had caught him exchanging tokens with her sister the Stuart. More likely it was the enmity of the judicial astrologers. + 

However it may be, his gibes fell, if not on hostile, at least on deaf ears, and he remained an exception; for whether they thought the influence benign or unbenign, almost all men through all the centuries till the last two or three thought it supernatural. + 

Then, with Bayle the great name of the change, a great change began. Comets were still thought to produce effects on the earth, and these effects were still thought to be chiefly baleful; the change was that they came to be regarded as natural and not supernatural effects, part of the foreordained order of physical things. Comets tampered with the atmosphere; caused curious dry fogs, or over-great heat, or divers sicknesses. The Plague of London in 1665, as the sleeping-sickness epidemic in Japan in our own day, was put down to cometary gases. Thou shalt die in a polluted land. + 

The utter danger, that a comet would accomplish the end of the whole earth, was not removed; but by honest collision, not by magic. + 

The nineteenth century’s attitude differed from that of all its predecessors. A comet meant nothing, favourable or unfavourable; it could produce no supernatural results or natural ones either. A world so perfect and so progressive could not be destined for such harm⁠—Providence would not be so foolish⁠—while of goodness it had enough, without help from the heavens. Human reason and human records alike controverted the cometic claims, and however eager to smile at their forebears of the nineteenth, twentieth century students who toil through the long Chinese records or through Pingré must admit that most of the visitors therein so monotonously registered did little to the earth that was worth doing, either good or bad. + 

The twentieth century began to waver. If “somehow good” lived on, it was flickeringly. Magic was in the air again, and catastrophe. Also new facts. It was demonstrated, for instance, that by means of the shooting stars showered down by comets, or the tenuous matter shed from their tails, new supplies of carbon, the stuff of life, were given to us. Life was thus renewed on the earth, declared optimists. Thus it was kept going or set going everywhere, added enthusiasts; comets were peripatetic creators, Jehovahs itinerant, beneficent bodies bearing carbon and with it organic existence from star to star, in vital permutation, high cosmic interchange, eternal xenogamy of worlds. + 

Pessimists, on the other hand, though with many a reserve and proviso to prevent themselves looking ridiculous, are returning to a catastrophic view; of a comet not as herald or harbinger of doom⁠—no worthy one announced Armageddon, the 1914 skies spake peace⁠—but as its actual agent. They think that one might strike the earth, or almost; and that if it did, the consequences would be fatal. Or almost. + 

What would happen? + 

The answer depends upon many factors: the composition of the comet, its speed, its proximity, the angle at which it struck. + 

Approaching, it might absorb the oxygen of the atmosphere. We should die, gasping and choking, of asphyxia. + 

It might absorb the azote, leaving us proportionately too much oxygen. We should live hours of nervous delirious joy, the whole world dancing a saraband or international hornpipe until through over-exultation we attained death cardiac or neurotic. + 

It might contain some gas to poison the air. The name of the star is called Wormwood. Our end would be velenous. + 

Its gases might combine and combust with our oxygen, causing conflagration of the air; concremation of our fields, our cities and ourselves. + 

It might triumph tidally, attracting the seas, pulling them up to cover the earth. The Deluge again; we should drown. + 

It might whirl up the earth to be its satellite; rock and reel us away. + 

It might bombard with boulders bigger than islands. Falling, these would chafe the air to unbearable heat; plunging into the sea, would produce tidal waves and worldwide floods; colliding with the land, would bore huge holes through to Gehenna beneath, new craters of burning, wherefrom in every direction cracks in the earth’s rind would radiate, new rows of craters of burning; fire added to fire and both to ravening water. + 

It might, advancing, cancel the earth’s movement; which, transformed into heat, would suffice to dissolve the globe. We should vanish in instant steam. + 

The choice is thus various; are the chances many? + 

Most astronomers answer with a comforting negative. Their contention is this. Space is infinite; the length of the earth’s annual circuit is enormous; comets are not infinite in number; few of them cut the terrestrial orbit. Therefore the arithmetical likelihood of a collision, or of even a nearish encounter, is infinitely small. Arago put the chances of crashing with the central kernel of a wanderer at one in two hundred and eighty-one million, or with some less central part say ten times greater: one in twenty-eight million one hundred thousand. Imagine a vast urn, he says, in which were twenty-eight million white balls meaning us no harm and one black ball condemning us to death. Should we take that one chance seriously? When we put in our hand to draw should we whine and shrink? + 

Even if the one chance fell, and a comet passed very near, its passage would be too quick to matter. It would have no time to scorch, poison, pull up the seas. In a few seconds it would be infinitely far away again, not having had the physical time to harm us. + 

Further, even the worst⁠—direct collision⁠—would be survivable. Comets have been weighed in the astrophysician’s balance and found wanting; the scale shows zero. They are but light-clouds, as Xenocrates and Theon of Alexandria called them long ago. The tails may contain vapours and a little meteoric dust, but are some forty-five billion times less dense than air; oftener they contain no substance at all, being a mere optical-electrical effect, as solid as a sunset; and a series of fine sunsets is the worst their swish could do for us. The kernel itself is, at its heaviest, but a diminutive cluster of meteors, impact wherewith could only mean the gay sunsets with a glorious shower of shooting stars thrown in. + 

These and other astronomical considerations are reinforced by the moral one that anything so unpleasant is also unlikely. + 

On the opposite side stand opposite arguments. + 

The comets number millions of millions. Far more, including the parabolic majority, must cut the earth’s orbit than is known. Biela’s comes every seven years to a place where we visit in November. In 1819, in 1832, in 1861⁠—to name but three neighbours in time⁠—the tip of the tail grazed us. In 1832 especially we had the narrowest escape: with the Reform Bill just being voted⁠—extension of the suffrage, redistribution of seats, Weymouth reduced to two members, Old Sarum disfranchised altogether⁠—what a disaster it would have been! In 1770 the earth and the comet were at the same point during the same day; only a few hours divided them from impact. Thus Arago’s one in twenty-eight million is a dubious estimate. One in twenty-eight thousand may be quite as accurate⁠—quite as inaccurate. A disaster avoidable by finite chance alone is not of infinite unlikelihood. Time is boundless. There is time for this. + 

To end us, no need for a comet to cut our orbit. It might crash with Jupiter, restore him his lost light, make him a sun again; we should be lighted by two suns; human life, inadaptable to eternal day, would perish. + 

There is reason to believe⁠—if one wants to⁠—that long ago a great comet did strike the earth, sinking Atlantis, causing the Great Drift, ushering in the last ice age. A greater comet may in the future do far worse. + 

Many are far from rarified. Larger than the earth itself, they are solid and opaque, containing a central mass of rocks and stones and sand as wide as Russia, collision with which would be the catastrophe. Solid they must anyhow be; the gases spectroscopically seen in them would have long ago vanished off into space unless there were a substantial nucleus to hold them gravitationally together. Some heads are as large as three moons. + 

Among the gases the spectroscope reveals are most deadly poisons. + 

Their extreme speed would only save us if their passage were distant; in case of crash so much the worse. + 

These and other astronomical considerations are reinforced by the immoral one that anything so unpleasant is also likely. + 

The sum of it all is that nobody knows. If destruction by this mode is not to be expected, it is not to be ruled out. We shall lie in our beds without trembling, but we shall respect the fear that inspired our ancestors, and shall ourselves respect⁠—and fear⁠—the next great comet that flames the dark night. Let it be but twice as large and come but twice as near as any of its predecessors, and then let the optimists see. Insane terror will seize them and us all. + 

Fire + 

Apart from those of the cometary ends which are also flaming ends, fire has fair chances of being the element that will conclude us. + 

Fire is the same word as pure, and many lands and ages have believed in its purifying virtue alike for soul and body. The impurer the flesh or spirit the purer had the flames to be. For the prostitute, fire of the forest; for this foul world, fire from on high. + 

Fire is elemental life; by burning, the individual life was given in sacrifice back to the elemental. This mode has therefore been accounted man’s most glorious mode of death; flames have made even self-murder noble and martyrdom, already noble, even nobler. In ancient India the pious one committed meritorious suicide if he chose fire, for thus he cleansed his soul at its passage from this world to the next. The ultimate success of the new religion in Reformation England, with the failure of the old, does not wholly explain, nor does the bias of our schoolbooks nor our biased selves their product wholly explain, why we regard with more shrinking the Marian persecution of the Protestants than the Elizabethan persecution of the Catholics, the balefires of Smithfield than the block of Tyburn, with more admiration the brave sectaries and reformers that perished in the one than the brave seculars and regulars that perished on the other. Success and bias together cannot explain the difference in our feelings; rather does the difference in our feelings explain both the success and the bias, and that difference is due, more than all else, to the greater glory and terror, inhumanity and purity, of death by fire. The sour sister burnt Protestantism into the English soul; the cynical sister could not axe Catholicism back. For triumph faith needs the torch. + 

As fiery death has been accounted most noble, so fiery obsequy has been accounted most magnificent. Iliad ends in a calm funeral twilight of great pyres. The loveliest Greek’s: for which they hewed high-foliaged oaks, and piled the wood, which they made a hundred feet this way and that, on which they set the corpse, while Achilles his lover slew twelve sons of Trojans (no daughters were there, whose bodies had burned better) as more glorious fuel, and prayed to the north wind and to the west wind till the flame kindled, and consumed the gentle body as they moaned around it: thus held they funeral for Patroklos son of Menoitos. The bravest Trojan’s: for which during nine days they gathered wood, which they built heaven-high, on which they laid him, on which they then cast fire, which burned his bones white as they wept tears around him: thus held they funeral for Hector, tamer of horses. + 

Of King Saul was fused everything, of King Pyrrhus all but his big toe. Then, following Greece, the pomped long history of Rome, pyrally alight with consular and imperial blazes, pyrally aloud with the conclamatio and the rustling of wings as the funeral eagles soar into heaven. So ancient Mexico; so the old North. + 

Many great nations, of course, not only declined but abhorred the practice; such as those of Zarathustrian faith who, holding that fire was God Himself, held that to burn their bodies would be to pollute Him⁠—excluding perhaps those Bombay modernists who debate, Does electricity count as burning? Such as the pre-Aryan peoples of Europe, such as the pre-Homeric Greeks. Such as the later Jews: was not that transgression for which Jehovah would not turn away the punishment of Moab, the death with tumult and trumpet and with shoutings, that he had burned the bones of the King of Edom into lime? + 

Many great names had burial not burning: the first Adam, who was inhumed on Calvary; the Second, who crucially died there. Counting all peoples, cremation would doubtless be outnumbered by cadaverous burial. + 

Yet the balance of superber custom is the other way, and fire, while it purified and glorified, was seen of many to be the commonsense mode also. Worms do not devour our ashes as they do our inhumated flesh; foes cannot deface nor defile them; no greedy six foot is needed to detain them. + 

As for men, so for the world. Cremation indeed was a compliment, an ever repeated rehearsal of “the finall pyre of alle things.” Life itself is a flame, as was said long ago, and remains the truest comparison; in the cyanogen type of theory as to how life first began, fire is the force that synthesized the albumen, and Haeckel joins hands with Heraclitus. What flame has given flame will take away; the commonest credence through history is world’s end by the master element. + 

Earliest peoples hold it. If, whether flame-crested cockatoo or fire-tailed wren, scarlet-necked kingfisher or robin-redbreast, it was, as the old legends tell, a fowl of the air that first stole fire for mankind, lo! as he flew his own plumage caught fire in seared forfeit; if, as in Greek story, the thief was a demigod, whether he rifled the sky-god in heaven or the forge-god in that Lemnian isle whither Zeus had down-hurled him, he too did Promethean penance by those three hundred centuries of torture on the Rock; if, as anthropology alleges, armed whether with fire-drill or fire-saw, firestone or fire-plough, it was impious man himself, the Inventor, who first raided the high sanctuary, then he too with his world shall atone, and perish beneath banners of burning. + 

The Romans maintained it, and Israel, and the Christians who inherited from both, and the Norsemen and the Aztecs who inherited from neither. Agni, whose banner is smoke, He shall devour⁠—proclaim the Vedas. + 

Dies irae, dies illa! + 

Solvet saeclum in favilla! + 

calls the Church. The Bible echoes her (or she the Bible): The Lord will come with fire, cried the mightiest of the Hebrew prophets; the mountains shall be molten under Him, the heavens shall vanish away like smoke. The heaven and the earth are reserved unto fire, wrote the chief of the twelve apostles; the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Apocrypha concurs: The fire is kindled, and shall not be put out till it consume the foundation of the earth. Christian eschatology confirms, foretelling the final destruction always through spirit of burning. Which is indeed oftenest dwelt on as moral burning, purifying the righteous and the penitent, cleansing their souls while destroying the souls of the wicked⁠—the earth’s flagrant end, though predicted as physical fact, being regarded as a spectacular side-issue, accompaniment or prelude to the real end, the religious end: the Last Judgment, the end of souls. + 

And we? Do the faith-free prophets of today think it likely or unlikely that this planet will so perish? Unlikely is their answer, clashing sharply with the old beliefs of man; though, as with the comet chance, they will hazard no stronger word. + 

How then? + 

Through deed of the sun’s.⁠ ⁠… + 

Who might grow bigger, as many stars do. The light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days. + 

Or smaller but hotter. Some heliographers declare that this is even now happening. At one stage in the sun’s life the balance between the heat he is continually losing, sending forth into space and squandering, and the regenerative heat he gains through contraction must tilt in favour of the latter. That stage, the maximum density stage, the paradox stage, the sun’s apogee through shrinking, may be not in the past but in the future, may be upon us tomorrow or today. + 

Who might burst. + 

Who might break in two; his interior part rotating so fast that spinning would lead to splitting. Our orbit would then become violently irregular. The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage. Long before we actually collided with either, we should have swung so near to one or other of the two halves of the sundered sun that all life would have been charred away. + 

Who might lure some brother sun too near. In the middle of a line of force, the earth would be stopped still, its onward movement changed into molecular movement, and be reduced to steam. + 

Who might, on his endless journey, move into some new region of space filled with different matter, or denser matter, there soon to develop some new form of radiation, or greater radiation; drift into one of the nebulae flung netwise through the cosmos, there at once to blaze like a meteor when it flies into our atmosphere; too near one of the hottest stars, an S Doradus, Gamma in Pegasus, Zeta in Perseus, able with their fifty thousand degrees of sidereal fire to ruin from very far; rush up against some heavenly medium resistant enough to convert into heat all the fearful energy of his progress. + 

Through deed of the earth’s own.⁠ ⁠… + 

Unhelped of the sun, not in solar mode but Stygian, Earth may find fire for self-destruction. The heat is there. We are still a gaseous globe, with a solid crust much thinner in proportion than eggshell to egg. The heat is there. Every fifty feet you go down the thermometer goes one degree up; two miles or so inward it is the boiling point of water, and there, below the lowest granite, the lowest gabbro, red-hot, white-hot, incalescent, incandescent, not a morning’s walk beneath our feet, glows the ardent underworld. Which, any hour, may renew its ancient zeal. No need to explode, to send flying the whole crust. The old channels to the old outlets show an easier way: forth of a thousand reawakened volcanoes, from the lowliest to the highest, from Cosima to Cotopaxi or the Sahama, burning matter, tumults of lava molten and magmatic, will spout and spread, covering the earth already riven and afire from great earthquakes, and struck by purple lightning. In three millenaries seventeen million people have died plutonically; all the seventeen hundred million people on the earth today may so perish in three minutes. + 

In plutonic perishing to be included not only eruptions but earthquakes, not only burstings through the crust but the crust’s own fatal shiftings, not only vulcanism but seism. If the crust is cooling faster and contracting faster than the globe as a whole, then the shell will get too small for the egg, and will crack here, break there, split everywhere; as the moon they say once did, which her streamers of obsidian seem to argue. Tension is increasing, and the coming period of continent-wide cracks and breaks, ups and downs, loud interchanges of land and sea, will blot out, together with ourselves, our memories of those gentler seismic centuries from Pompei to Lisbon and Lisbon to San Francisco. Or if it is the earth that is getting smaller more quickly than her crust, then the crust is getting too big, and to adapt itself to the dwindling mass it encloses must further fold and crinkle, as though not already pulled and strained and faulted enough by the speed with which she turns (madly whirls) on her axis. Such adaptations also, such crinklings, will take the form of earthquakes more fearful than any in the past, and miserably destroy mankind. + 

Whether sun-helped or self-kindled, how bravely the earth will flare! Her garments of gladness are cinerable, incremable; her wood is all touchwood; her green tunic of verdure is wrought not of salamander’s wool, has no woof incombustible nor warp asbestine; every tree and every town shall be fuel, all people and all palaces for devouring, all life shall be food for the flames. Souls into slag and embers; burning instead of beauty. + 

There are gainsayers, who cap each pyromaniac might with fireproof won’t. + 

The sun won’t grow larger; he’s too old. + 

He won’t grow hotter; long ago he turned compression corner, and began spending more heat than he earns. + 

He won’t burst; having no crust to burst through. + 

He won’t divide; not having the special properties of the fissurable stars, will know no Great Schism. + 

With that line of force he cannot terrify us, torrify us; are we not already in a straight line, if straight lines there be, between him and every other star? + 

He may indeed drift into a nebula. That chance, unlike the others, is not fantastic; but it is small, and need not be fatal. We’ve been wandering through heaven this last few myriad years without such mishap. + 

Yet more hopeless of fulfilment are the non-solar prophecies of calorific end; firemongers come off even worse than with the sun. + 

The earth won’t explode. Her shell may be thin, but it’s strong⁠—strong enough to have held its own against all the subterranean forces ever since they first permitted it to form. + 

Volcanoes are becoming extinct. + 

The seismic curve is downward. + 

Add and combine all their dire possibilities; together they touch not probability. Crueller gods than Vulcan lie in wait. + 

Yet, if burnt, think some, what matter? We shall live again. Earth is Phoenix. + 

Who had five hundred years of radiant life. Then, still splendid, his wings laden with spices, he flew from Hindustan to Heliopolis, entered the temple there; of sweet woods, frankincense and cassia, fuel-yew undeciduous, eternal, built him his own pyre on the altar, fanned with his own wings the flame, and was burned to ashes; wherein next day was born a new phoenix, feathered and fledged, who on the third day saluted the priest and flew away into India, for five hundred new years of radiant life. + 

Earth is Phoenix. Burned to ashes, she would live again, and, when the hour came round, through new fire of Easter Eve, lumen Christi, Paschal candle of destruction, again would die. + 

This is the Stoics’ theory. After its five hundred⁠—five million million⁠—years of life, the world is to end by violence of fire. An identical one will be born from the phoenical ashes, salute the sun, then set forth on its cycle of flight. And so forever: through an endless cycle of decalescence, recalescence, there being no one world⁠—rather an infinite series of identical worlds, having lived an eternity of times, with an eternity of times to live. + 

Sometimes we seem to remember, and to foresee. + 

Water + 

Not fire but flood. + 

Less patron’d by the generations of old, this mode has in revenge had greater dominion over more modern expectation. + 

In first result, Comet and Fire might be watery ends. A comet could pull up the deeps, and flood before it poisoned or struck. Increased heat could drown ere it had time to scorch: at the first touch of the sun grown mightier the mountain snows would melt with terrible speed, would pour down in myriad converging streams from all high places into all low; from the Alps into the over-civilized European lowlands, into Italy, Germany, France; from the Himalayas into the over-peopled Ganges plains, torrenting from Everest to Comorin; from the African heights into the black jungles south and west, and northward into Egypt, which would see rise up the River, swallowing the Cairene delta and the oldest seats of fear; from the Rockies into the proud Yankee prairies, the twentieth century’s chief seat of expected power; from the Andes into the Latinate pampas, perhaps, unless the end comes earlier, to be the chief seat of the twenty-first’s. All men that had not perished of the sun’s rays would be devoured by the sun-driven waters. Not with hope could they lift up their eyes to the hills, for from the mountains of prey their doom would be triumphing down. Vainly they cling for a few poor days or hours to refuges near them, the swiftest or craftiest climbing to cathedral towers, Milan or Cologne or Chartres, to pagoda or temple tops, to the peaks of the Pyramids, to Woolworth’s seven-and-fiftieth, or such Argentine monster as may yet outbuild it. In white-faced terror of drowning, vainly they climb: the waters increase and prevail, and quench the last cry. + 

Which flood through heat should be classed, if with scant comfort for its victims, as a mere incidental water-end. The aqueous future proper that, confirming some ancient beliefs, some modern geologists foretell is the less spectacular one of the slow conquest of the world’s land by the world’s sea, the gradual covering of the earth by the waters of the great deep. The erosionists clasp Noah’s Ark. + 

Whether the Bible Deluge ever took place is matter of combat and conjecture. Great inundations all agree there must have been; whether one of these was not merely widespread but almost universal, and whether not almost universal but quite, forms the subject of a whole literature and is still an unsettled controversy, even among anti-inspirationists themselves and those most anxious to prove all old tales old wives’ tales. Some geologists discern in the past⁠—as some others in the future also⁠—a time of worldwide volcanic eruptions and upheaval of mountain chains, accompanied by subsidences of land and followed by great waves of translation that traversed the tumbled continents and engulphed the antediluvian animals with antediluvian man. What of Cythera? The upward-fleeing skeletons from base to peak, seeking vain safety from the waters behind and upon them? What of the Mountain of Bones? + 

How the Flood began and proceeded: how the windows of heaven were opened and all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, how the waters increased, how they prevailed, how they prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, fifteen cubits upwards did the waters prevail, and how all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered, with only Noah remaining alive and they that were with him in the ark, all this is known to every child in Christendom: the Bible tells him. How in the pagan variant it was Jupiter and not Jehovah who sent forth the rain-bringing South wind and summoned the sea, till the dolphins played among the forest-tops and the wolves swam among the sheep and only Parnassus tip was left and only Deucalion son of Prometheus and Pyrrha daughter of Pandora were saved in their boat, is known to every child of the classics: Apollodorus informs us. How in the Chaldaean stories, Hasisadra (or Xisathros), warned by Ea (or Kronos), took into the ark with him not only couples of the domestic animals but also a couple of domestic servants, one male and one female, both butler and bondswoman, so that that useful species also might be perpetuated, along with a few “intimate friends” and Buzurkugel, the trained steersman, is familiar to Orientalists: who have the tablets that Asshur-banipal ordered, and Berosius’ exciting narrative. How the Red Indians remembered it, as in the story Snapping Turtle told his paleface questioner, we know from beloved Catlin. How the Celestial flood was worldwide like the Pentateuchal, and how Yü proved himself every inch a Noah, stands written in Shu King, in the oldest of literatures. How, finally, in almost all peoples’ traditions the event is there, though the details may differ oddly, and what those details are, is known to comparative folklore students and diluvian specialists alone. + 

The races without any flood record are few: only the Negroes, the Japanese and the Egyptians. There is a theory that the last-named once had the legend, but deliberately forgot it or changed it. For them the rising of waters was their wealth, their life, their hope; that one flood they knew, yearly, Nilotic, was the best thing they knew. Flood as disaster they could not conceive of; any such legend must be a false legend. + 

Despite this almost universal tradition, no quiet universal deluge may ever have taken place. Local disasters may have been magnified by memory and myth into general ones. + 

The Shu King account is indeed partly founded on fact; for in the twenty-fourth century before Jesus the Hwang-Ho, Yellow River, Sorrow of China, had historically risen and ruined half the land. Half the land though, not half the world. Then the Noachian story. The animals went in two by two. Did they, forsooth! What ablest zoo-keeper from Hamburg or Regent’s Park could pretend that with a total staff of seven⁠—wife, three sons, and three sons’ wives⁠—to help him he could have managed that multitudinous procession of all the beasts of the field and fowls of the air, the dinosaurs and the donkeys, the iguanodons and the hummingbirds, the moths and the behemoths, not to consider the quantity and diversity of the fodder to be collected and stored, and the cage (or cabin) arrangements, and the cleaning? + 

Yet, when every little Victorian laugh has been re-laughed, the strangely widespread character of the story must be allowed to count for much, supported as it is by evidence ranging from the state of the mammoth fossils in Siberia, and the position of bones in countless cave recesses, far apart, where only water could have carried them, and the grouping of those bones, men’s and hyaenas’ side by side, who would never have laired together, and their tumultuous arrangement and their diluvial coating, to the Great Thaw that followed the last ice age, the newer theories of continent-tumblings and continent-floodings, and the very latest and smartest deductions from radioactivity and isostasy. + 

Naturally the old stories show discrepancies on this point or that: some, like the Persian account, giving a volcanic origin⁠—it was the fiery dragon from the South⁠—some alleging a pluvial cause, some others a pelagian, and the Welsh legend and the Mexican casting their respective heroes, Dwyfan and Dwyfach the double steersman, and Cox-Cox the steersman with so apt a double name, for quite different roles from those that Berosius or Moses cast for theirs. Discrepancies of elaboration or elucidation, that do but push the main facts into bolder relief. What other cosmological myth carries such conviction, seems to rest so imperiously upon bedrock of truth? + 

The flood-fearers had one advantage over the flame-fearers; they had precedents for protecting themselves⁠—and knew how to. It was easier, moreover, to be armed against water than against fire; Man saw that he could not salamandrize the whole surface of the earth, turn it into one vast asbestos ark; but he could make himself arks of gopher wood, watertight, seaworthy⁠—and he did. Sporadically throughout the Middle Ages that strange shipbuilding went on, one famous exponent being good Doctor Auriol of Toulouse, cleric and don, who, when the German astrologer Stoffler foretold the Final Deluge for 1524, built an ark large enough not only for himself and all his family but⁠—most unselfishly, and setting a much-needed retrospective example to Deukalion and Noah⁠—for all his friends as well. The waters never came, St. Swithin failed him, but the doctor had at least the satisfaction (in addition to joy of knighthood, royal payment for the long harangue of welcome he delivered to Francis the First when that monarch visited the town) of being prepared and forearmed. More solid satisfactions had those who, believing Stoffler not, acquired at job-lot prices the seaside and riverside property of those believing. + 

Whatever our beliefs about such beliefs, that man held them, that he believed the Flood had happened, is what matters here; and believed it might happen again, and next time spare no Noah. For if fire-end has held pride of place, flood-end has never lacked supporters: Parthians, Persians, some Peruvians. Watery Amos counters fiery Isaiah. The burden of the desert of the sea: it shall rise up wholly like the River. Nor were the two contradictory. Under the Cyclic Theory of ever-repeated destruction, ever-recurring rebirth and re-death of the world, water and fire alternate; the conflagratio breaks out in the great summer of the Magnus Annus of disaster, the diluvium mounts in the great winter. + 

For centuries, however, the flood-fear halted until, during the nineteenth, it was given new life by certain geologists. + 

Gradually, through long ages, the continents will become level. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. Then, there being more water than land⁠—enough of the former to cover the latter all over and have two inches to spare⁠—the land must finally vanish. We shall drown. + 

This, unless some other agency should get in first⁠—this will and must happen. + 

It is happening now. A usual estimate of the world area lost by land to sea is some ten or eleven square miles a year. + 

The loss is not evenly distributed over the globe; for, if others lose, some countries actually gain against the sea. Where was half Holland a thousand years ago? Where is Atlantis now? + 

Nor evenly distributed through the divers parts of any one country. For instance Italy; where, if in many an eroded republican corner the sea is victor, she draws back defeated near east-imperial Ravenna and west-imperial Rome, victorious Rome. Or England; where, though the west coast on the whole is a winner, the east coast loses much more. If, as commercial enemies allege, at Southport the sea view is now telescopic only, the once crown of Lancastrian resorts can console herself by remembering that across the Pennines, on the rival White Rose coast (on a dead straight line to the tiniest fraction of latitude), Ravenspur, where Henry the Fourth once landed to claim that other Lancastrian crown, is now a sepulchred city far out beneath the invading sea. + 

But, for the whole world, the loss is always larger than the gain; the net adverse balance being those ten or eleven square miles a year. Take the mileage of the five continents, and find out how long we have. + 

If some natural forces work the other way⁠—with some human ones, English training-walls, Dutch dikes⁠—at best they retard a little the end. The Sea is stronger. Time is with her. She has more, and more powerful, allies. All the forces of nature are her allies. + 

The sun. He heats the rocks by day, but not by night; they expand, they diminish; their texture is weakened. He scorches the surface, but not the inner parts; their texture is made uneven. Soaked by rain, he over-rapidly dries them. They lose their molecular cohesion. They crumble. They fall down into the sea. + 

The rain. It cooperates with the sun⁠—allies all⁠—wetting, weakening, dissolving, oxydizing, rotting, rusting. It gets into the cracks the sun has made; where, in winter changed into snow, it wedgewise cleaves asunder the rocks, made thus yet weaker for the sun’s further action and still readier for the sea. + 

The rivers. They wear away their channels and bear downward in their muddied waters granite and lime and sand, our stolen foothold and heritage; downward always, denudationally, to the sea. + 

The beasts. In their castings the earthworm and the white ant bring up, moles and rabbits burrow up, annual mountain immensities of under-earth to the surface; made loose, comminuted, prompt to be blown away by the wind or carried by raindrops to the rivers, and so at last, these also, to the sea. + 

Glaciers assist; ice-meteors clash in the air; the force of gravity solemnly pulls its weight. While the wind, from the shore carrying light particles seaward, from the sea beating against the loosened rocks with fierce loose grains of sand, makes aeolian erosion not the least of the many forces working to disinherit us and to drown. + 

Last, and victorious, mother of terror, man’s first home and final enemy, there is the Sea herself, mightier than all these her helpers. She abates not, nor assuages. Against the world’s two hundred thousand miles of coastline she wars unceasingly; she batters with stone and shingle, with her tides and her currents, her unseen salts and her seen white tempests; she beats, she eats; she crashes, she corrodes. At long last she will have us; the ultimate land for man’s feet will be swallowed; the waters shall cover the earth. + 

Drought + 

Not water, but dearth thereof; not drowning, but drouth. + 

A negative mode for our finishing, and one therefore that has occupied less place in the fears and imaginations of men. + 

Yet, though there’s no drought story spread wide to match the flood story, shortage of water is like to have been both more frequent and more fatal than excess thereof, at any rate since measurable antiquity; more men and beasts have died of it, and of the famine its offspring. As a local and immediate terror it has indeed haunted countless nations, who to exorcize it have appealed to countless gods. In how many famished synagogues have not the dark Talmudic solemnities against the dryness been accomplished unto Jehovah; from how many ravenous mosques has not the droned salāt for rain gone up to the steel-blue skies and Allah above them; through how many Persian temples have not the long incantations against Apaosha the drought-demon mournfully sounded for the ears of Ormazd; under how many African prayer-trees has not the magical howl for the raindrops been uttered to move Mumbo Jumbo’s stony heart? When the grass faileth, when there is no green thing, God under all these His names has been prayed to, petitioned, propitiated. + 

And sometimes He has been tricked. In the Spice Islands where, for that sin of incest He most abhorreth, in divine displeasure He sends as punishment torrential rains, the priests publicly organize incestuous orgies, staged contacts of horror, and then cry out: “O gods above, come, show your wrath; send rain!” The raven’s cry breaks drought⁠—his reward for that day he taught Adam bury Abel, eldest of burials⁠—and in all lands and islands, decoying famine-throats have copied his cry, till the bird’s own throat echoed, and the windows of heaven were opened. + 

Here and there a people has believed in the whole world’s arid end: as in old Peru. Now and then the Prophets of Israel, impartially foreseeing all unpleasant things, gave it their vote: He rebuketh the sea, and drieth up all the rivers, and everything shall wither, be driven away, and be no more.⁠ ⁠… But always having had known geographical limits in the past, drought has not often been dreaded as the total destroyer in the future. Today its adherents would be proportionately more numerous than at any hour in history before. + 

Gradually, through long ages, the earth is drying up. Within observable geological time, water has diminished. It is still diminishing. It will go on diminishing. We shall die parched. + 

Water, and with it life, will one day disappear from the globe. A usual estimate of the world area lost by water to land is some ten or eleven square miles a year. Take the measure of the seven seas, and find out how long we have. + 

The chief considerations urged on behalf of this diametrically opposite view are diametrical denials of the chief considerations set forth for watery triumph. + 

Levelling of lands is admitted, up to a point; assuaging of waters has more than kept pace. + 

Rain may do its share of dissolving and carrying away; much more of it penetrates through the porous earth into the lower soil, where it is crystallized, converted into hydrates, and so lost to the liquid cause. Besides, there is always less of it; the atmosphere is dryer, clouds fewer than they were. God’s rainbow promise was cynical. + 

Wind and sun may have destroying action; their drying action is mightier. + 

All coasts where the prevailing winds are landward are increased by new stretches of sand-dunes. Ocean, the supposedly all-powerful, is in open battle losing more than she gains. The waters shall fail from the sea. He hath said to the deep: Be dry. + 

Mere trees keep pace with her; in Florida the mangoes are thrusting out seaward in wide swamps. + 

Rivers may carry away. But not much of what substance they do sweep down is finally lost. More is saved for us, against oceans in the form of terrigene bands, against inland seas in the form of deltas, whereon man flourishes exceedingly, building him there most victorious cities. Behold the deltoid map: Nile’s great knee pushes northward, thrusting the Midland Sea aside; Ganges and Brahmaputra share a mouth, whose long teeth, every year longer, gnaw southward into the Gulf of Bengal; half Louisiana is but Mississippi’s sharp tongue, lapping up the Mexican Bay, prairie mud racing mango swamps to add a second jutting Florida to Dixie. + 

All lakes are shrivelling. Half the lakes⁠—the ex-lakes⁠—of Europe have become alluvial dry land. The other half are following. Compare the Sea of Geneva today with the Leman of Roman times; far inland from the tourist shore the old Imperial ports lie stranded. + 

Hand-in-hand against the water work all other terrestrial agencies. + 

Atmospheric agencies. The air itself is slowly dribbling off into outer space, its moisture with it. + 

Eruptive ones. In the period of intenser volcanic activity soon to appear, a few hundred thousand folk here and there may be killed, but the human race as a whole will win respite; the craters will spew up empires of lava, to add to our landed store. One first-class eruption alone will throw forth enough land from the bowels of the earth to make up for millenaries of erosion. + 

Animal ones. Mightier than earthworm for the water’s side, fight polyp and coral for the waterless. After a submarine eruption, the coral insects at once set to and build around the new-formed crater. One pink generation dies; the next one begins on the skeletons, pitilessly, as calcareous platform for its own campaign. Land peeps out. The mariner sees before him a new atoll not seen on his chart, a truly magical new island of desire. Ocean is that much the smaller. + 

Squarest denial is reserved for the two prime aqueous arguments. + 

First, that the sea has in point of evident fact gained on the land. + 

The land has in point of evident fact gained on the sea. Those terrestrial forests and their fossils discovered under the ocean, proving that where now is sea was land, are demonstrably less spacious than those marine deposits discovered far inland and high up, miles from the shore and thousands of feet above it; than those older sedimentary rocks, once deposited in the deeps, which now tower on the loftiest Andean cones or in highest Himalaya⁠—proving that where now is land was sea. + 

I’ve seen what was most solid earth before + 

Become a Sea, the Sea become a Shore; + 

Far from the Sea Sea-Cocles often lie + 

And Anchors old are found on Mountains high; + 

Land-floods have made a Valley of a Plain + 

And brought a Mountain with them to the Main. + 

Impartial Ovid! Impartial oceanography allows that both Metamorphoses occur; but the sea-receding one more largely. According to the preachers of the Six Cycles⁠—the periodical up-and-down movement of the ocean floor, first an age of tilting up and mountain-building, then an alternate age of transgressional seas and continent-sinking⁠—in the end it is the land that wins. The waters have shifted, but they have lost. The vast bulk of the Ganges delta and Gangetic plains, if it shows how vastly the Himalayas must have been lowered to build them, shows chiefly that what the heights were denuded of has not been lost for terra firma. The cyclic seas once swallowed up Gondwanaland, the old great Indian Atlantis; the aquophobe cycle replied by building up the new great peninsula of Hindustan. + 

Second, that there is now more water than land. + 

There is more land than water. It is only the trifling mass of the sea-depths that is greater than the trifling mass of the raised earth; below the deepest Pacific soundings, as below all the continents, there is solid earth right down unto the fires within. Taking the total cubic capacity of the globe, solid outnumbers liquid a multitude of times. As the earth ages and shrinks, this disproportion will augment, slow desiccation continuing till the last drop of water is dried up, till the world is a desert of dead men. + 

Consider also the heavens. The moon, being smaller than the earth, dried and died sooner, and now is a cloudless, sealess, waterless world, image of what we one day shall be. Venus, our younger sister, still modestly veiled in a garment of white clouds, is an image of our fresh innocence in the past, a world of young sparkling waters. Mars, our elder brother, has few clouds left to cover him; he is parching rapidly; there roll no oceans more for his warlike ships to ride on, only inland black seas, paltry Euxines. Along his two belts the thirsty deserts are spreading. They are spreading along ours. Along Cancer. Central Asia is perishing, Gobi grows; Babylon and Nineveh are under the sand, Arabia Petraea waxes. In the Holiest Land not all the gold of Zionism will make the milk and honey flow again; the waves of the Sahara now greet the waves of the sea and have long engulfed the richest granary of Rome, devouring Rome; despite Wall Street the Great American Desert remains one. Along Capricorn. The South Australian and South African and South American wastes are not receding, any more than the vaster opaline wastes on Mars. Who still has vegetation in his dried sea-bottoms, as here the last herb will sprout feebly from the parched Pacific floor. + 

Being made up of seven parts water in ten, from a water-losing much sooner than from a land-losing planet man is doomed to go. Before the globe was cool enough for water to appear, organic life did not exist; carbon could not combine to form the plasm. It will not exist when the globe is too cold for water to remain. An Ark for the Deluge; there’s no Ark against the Drought. + 

Without water, vegetation must die, and the herbiverous creatures that live on it, and we that live on them both. Surely the people is grass. + 

Flood certain; drought certain⁠—how far is there paradox? Thus far: that, save the Living Terror, nothing is certain. + 

Yet, though no certitude, both the dry-land school and the blue-water school have some chance of being justified; in the long up-and-down future of geological time one individual factor, on the one side or the other, may rise suddenly eminent above all probable calculation, and, its allies gathering insolence with it, and all of these acquiring momentum together, may be able to tilt the balance for its own side and win to time, without yet proving the opposite prophets, who also tabled on averages and likelihoods, either knaves or fools. Is it paradox to say that the average man has about equal chances of dying of thirst in Arabia or of drowning in the Atlantic, of succumbing to dropsy or disease of dryness? + 

Equal chances, equally remote; postponement rather than paradox. For these two hold pace with each other, cancel each other, defeat each other, in terraqueous equilibrium delay each other, until that far day when the earth, having eluded all accidents and pulled through all illnesses, will perish only, when her hour is up, of old age or its other name, the Cold. + 

Cold + 

Not accident nor illness, mishap nor malady, not warmth nor water nor desire of water; but the Cold. Is this, at last, the doom inevitable; the patient doom that can outwait the others, that though all they should fail us will not fail? + 

The man of science, who cancels flood by drought and drought by flood, laughs at all fiery threatenings and puts comet-fears with fairytales, now laughs no longer. Even he knows the world must die, and this is his chosen death. He plumps for the cold and the darkness. + 

Nor is he here in conflict with older prophets: some Hebrew ones⁠—the day of the Lord, cried Amos, it is darkness and not light⁠—and Norse ones, who foretold that Balder god of brightness must die in the end, when Fimbul-Winter will return again and forever. Nor in conflict with the heart’s own last vision of terror⁠—Eternity: the Cold and the Darkness. + 

On this hypothesis, as on others, there may be cooperation for destruction. Cold may be bound up with or incidental to or helped out by some other agency. + 

Many, perhaps most, adherents of the No Water school, think we shall hardly get so far as to fail of direct drought. Water, which absorbs, retains and gives out again the heat the sun sendeth, in slowly disappearing from the atmosphere is rendering it slowly colder. No oxygen will save, when that fractional drop of water becomes more fractional; the world will become too cold to live in, as a result of its dryness, before it becomes too dry. + 

Our vanishing air⁠—not only the vanishing water in it⁠—secretly collaborates. It is going the way of the moon’s lost atmosphere; with it will go our best protection from the cold; without it we shall succumb. It will lessen as the sun’s heat lessens, just when we need it most. + 

The terrestrial movements contribute. Whereby we may die of cold in two separate stages: one hemisphere of earlier palsy, the other of final frost. Earth’s two different forms of rotation proceeding at different speeds, partition strains result; the strains become tides; the tides act as brakes. Forspent, the world slows down; halts, wearily creeps to paralysis. At last the two rotations will coincide. In that hour, there will be no seasons more: one hemisphere will be turned forever to the night; the other, warmer awhile, all the year and for all the years to the sun⁠—till he too, the prime destroyer, shall go out and, all other deaths avoided, achieve man’s total end. + 

What is the Sun? + 

Hor, Sol, Ra; Sūrya Mitra, Savitr; Helios, Phaethon, Phoebus Apollo⁠—he has had many names; many temples from Persia to Mexico, from Stonehenge to Xauxa, from the high Quirinal in Rome, golden Rome⁠—Urbs solaris imperialis⁠—to golden Cuzco, gold within, gold without, Cosa Sagrada, la imperial ciudad. In every mythology he has been a deity, or at the lowest a mighty man⁠—do the Andaman Islanders confirm their title as the lowest of peoples by accounting him a woman, and the wife of the moon at that? He has been worshipped since there were worshippers, adored since souls knew adoration. He is a god. + 

He is a star. A middle-aged star of middle size and, as social brilliance in the heavens is reckoned, of strictly middle-class station: no Betelgeuse for bulk, no Sirius for glory, Companion of Sirius for dwarf intensity of glory. His burning heart is enclosed within the photosphere, a layer of red-hot ocean of gas, deeper than Asia, lashed all around into waves and Everest-high jets of scarlet spray that from the earth would sprinkle the moon; the chromosphere, his cloak of helium and hydrogen; the corona of coronium; the light zodiacal. His heat in the centre runs to millions, at the surface to thousands of degrees. Better guide than the mercury is to feel him shining in his strength on a Sahara noon, an Aden teatime, and to reflect that he is sending us a two thousand millionth part of it, and sending it from over ninety million miles away. + 

He has had children. Under most theories of the world’s origin⁠—nebular, tidal, planetesimal, collisional⁠—he is our parent, ancestor, creator; by him we had life. Under all physical theories of the world’s present, by him we live. + 

Lucerna Mundi, lantern of the world, by him we see. + 

He maintains the seas, the lakes and the rivers. He keeps in gaseous state the air we must breathe, in liquid state the water we and all living things must absorb⁠—so much whereof as we need he vapourizes and turns into clouds, which he drives the winds to distribute for us. He enables the plants to assimilate their food from the air, and so is the author of all fruits, flowers and trees; the wine we drink and the wood we burn are directly informed of him, the warmth they give us is indirectly his. His spots pulsate, and we pulsate in answer. Electricity, radioactivity and their thousand daughter inventions are his; and the force in our brains and in our bodies. In him we live and move and have our being. Without him we are not. + 

And he is dying. + 

Through all those asserted certainties⁠—water, fire and the rest⁠—we had come so far to none so absolute. It is a fact no closing of eyes, no denying of objective reality can avert, no mystical-mathematical four-dimensional universe of point-events and curved space-time can exclude, no magical non-dimensional universe of God’s Dream or the Devil’s can abolish; within the framework of every scheme and every schemelessness the same will happen, the sun will die⁠—just as each one of us will die in his time, whatever the grand plan or no-plan of the terrible universe may be. + 

Optimism seeks to prolong his life a little. Declares him of low density, susceptible of much further compression, able for long ages yet to generate more heat than he radiates. Chemical processes reinforce the contractional one, radioactive processes the chemical: the transmutation of his store of radial elements is a process almost everlasting, ensuring him effluence of light almost stanchless. His positive and negative ions bombard each other, whose mutual annihilation secures their common eternity as heat. Millions of meteors rush hourly upon him, their high speed compensating for their lowly size and making them substantial augmenters and preservers. Above all he is young, still in the bright earlier yellow-heat stage that (on one of the stubborner new theories of stellar evolution) precedes the white-heat of middle life and far precedes the sere later yellow-heat stage, the second childhood, the long late afternoon of stars. Even when at last he should dwindle, the earth would then be moving nearer him, and thus be keeping pace⁠—and keeping warm. + 

Pessimism curtails it. Density is high; compression peak was passed long ago; generation of new heat has ceased and only radiation is continuing, at the rate of two hundred and fifty million tons a minute, three hundred and sixty thousand million tons a day. If chemically engendered, his warmth has not long to last; a piece of coal is soon burnt out. Though radial transmutation be proceeding, and the loud cannonades of ionization, either is at best an “almost” eternal process; which means nothing, piteous nothing. The meteors are paltry helpers; if he attracted enough of them to be worth while, his size would continually be increasing; and it is not increasing. Above all he is old; astrophysically provable in the second yellow era. Even were he not dwindling away, the earth would always be getting less of his heat, since ever receding from him into the cold outer distance. + 

Leave all such hopes and counter-hopes. Leave aside the sunspots and other such famous regions of solar controversy. Leave out of account the respective chances of his entering a colder corner of the universe or a warmer⁠—look away altogether from the sun himself. Look back to the earth, or beyond to the stars. + 

Chronometrically classified by spectral seniority, the stars are known by their age. Like man they pass through seven ages, passing from one to the next with as much choice or chance of rebellion as has he. Whether the sun’s epoch be that of early middle-age or late, the difference is at most between a very little more than half his course to run or a very little less. The whole course must be run, till the seventh age and last. + 

That the earth was once warmer than now, there is persuasive testimony. Despite cyclical reversions, such as the present warm spell following the last ice age, and even though the ice ages be not caused, or not chiefly caused, by diminution in the solar heat but by this or that wayward difference of ellipticity in the earth’s own orbit or whatnot else⁠—even so, the line of the thermic graph is in the long run always downward. After each glacial era the warm reaction is less warm than the time before. The lull after the Cambrian Ice Age was out of comparison warmer than this. There were no deciduous trees. Could the Coal Forests flourish in South Wales or North France today? Could the reptiles now stretch from pole to pole? As late as the warm centuries after the last ice age but one, no permanent snow and ice remained; the polar caps are brand-new. If Arctic fossils are found embedded in what are now warmer climes, as the famous reindeer of Southern France, tropical fauna and flora are far oftener found in what are now colder regions. The primates, we and the monkeys, originated in the Arctic Circle; Peary found Eden. Greenland was once green; amid her Icy Mountains did not the breadfruit trees once wave? Were not the London tubes, a few yards below our streets, cut through clay that enclosed great tropical shells? Does not the Southern Railway, as it crawls over Kent, but piously emulate its predecessors there, the crocodiles? In Paradise⁠— + 

Si plain de joye et de solas + 

Que nus n’y puet devenir las⁠— + 

did not the sun, as Adam long afterwards told Seth, shine daily, all day, deliciously? In the Golden Age was not the world warmer and lovelier, while happiness stretched to the far north? Then the flight from the Poles began. It will continue till we huddle on the Equator. + 

Man will fight his fate. He will adapt himself. Even today he can survive in parts of Siberia that in January are no warmer than the moon. He will adapt nature; will learn to utilize the earth’s internal heat, if need be moving underground to become a cave-dweller again, and to economize the sun’s. His industries, by chance and then deliberately, will increase the amount of carbonic gas in the air, and so help the latter to retain heat, increase heat, and distribute it more evenly. Heat thus eked out with a hundred strange inventions, light he will learn to dispense with. In ways we cannot conceive of, any more than the mole or the mastodon could conceive of ours, our descendant race, if still on the planet millions of years from now⁠—Man let us still proudly dub him⁠—will be fighting for his life; every secret of terrible science, every trick of his terrified brain, will be called into play to hold up, perhaps for ages, the inevitable end. + 

Inevitable. As the sun’s light and warmth grow less, the means of artificially conserving them will grow more complicated, and after a while less efficient. By when, despite all strugglings, all undreamt marvels, all delays, the temperature must have fallen by forty or fifty degrees everywhere, earth will have changed from anything we can imagine, will have dwindled to a belt of Equatorial Eskimos white-girdling the icebound tropics. Dimness of anguish; dayfall of the world. God will have fulfilled His grim promises: He will have darkened the sun in his going forth, He will have made their vintage shouting to cease. + 

Down by sixty or seventy, there will be no life more; and earth a bleak charnel-house, a whited sepulchre. The oceans, if still existent, will be of ice; the clouds, if still any, will be of snow. No wind, no warmth, no rain; no flesh wherein is the breath of life. The cold and the darkness. + 

The last man will have lain long unburied across the equator of the ageing wizened globe, long have forgotten the story of splendour and sorrow of the strange race that perished with him, long have forgotten the dwindling purple sun his eyes beheld in the moment when they closed forever. + 

Like the frozen corpse, or vespillo of corpses, still whirling around him, the sun in his turn will die. A solid crust will form; gases will become oceans, molten lava dry land. Death will come upon him more quickly; he will receive no vivifying rays from outside, as the earth did from him; the sun will have no sun. More swiftly will his oceans turn to ice, his atmosphere descend on him as a pall of fine white snow. Seen from far off⁠—seen by Whom?⁠—he will change from gold to vespertine yellow, to red, to dark purple; then to sackcloth of hair, frozen black. + 

When he too is gone, with whatever race of beings his cooling-time may have witnessed upon him, the last men of earth will countless myriads of years have been dead. He mourned them, perhaps; himself will die threneless. + 

Crash + 

But Earth herself? Who, for all the harm frost could do her, might go on travelling round the dead sun forever. + 

The globe too, this orb of solid matter, will have an end; whether early, in time to preclude man’s separate dooms, or late, infinite ages after he has gone. Which end is collision, impact, dissolving crash. + 

Not probably with a comet. Though that derided chance, being also in the nature of a concussion, a catastrophe, may lift up high again its fiery head. + 

Nor with a meteor. No bolide or shooting-star ever experienced has been large enough to do the world grave damage, leave alone demolish it. No bethel ever fallen from heaven and erected on earth has stood higher than three of its worshippers; not great Diana of the Ephesians, nor the baetylical idol of Zeus Teleios at Tegea, nor Jacob’s pillar of thanksgiving at Luz-Bethel itself. That famous stone that fell in Phrygia, and was raised to godhead as Cybele, measured a yard or two. That scar in the Painted Desert, though the mightiest meteoric consequence alleged, is not half-a-mile in radius, not a furlong deep. There may of course be meteor-troops many times more numerous, with each trooper many times bigger, than anything deducible either from past knowledge, or from present acquaintance with friendly Aquarids and Gremenids and Leonids; since meteorites come from outside the solar system, how affirm anything absolute, whether as to their maximum size or their maximum speed? The meteor death-roll through history is so far two: a peasant once in India, a cow long ago in Brazil. + 

Nor with a planet. Their courses are ordered like our own, and will remain separate and regular while ours does. + 

Perhaps with the sun. If we his satellites, moving ever quicker, and ever nearer him, should one day fall on him bodily. + 

Probably with the moon. The Sagas knew it; it was revealed to the Prophet at Mecca. Of all the stories, as of all the theories, this one alone has found acceptance of pure mathematics, elsewhere so scornful; this one alone has been prophetically worked out to the last omega of the last perfect formula; if mathematics is valid, this is valid. For the solar tides are lengthening the period of rotation of the earth, till one day, some five hundred thousand million years from now, it must become longer than the period of rotation of the moon. This latter will then be retarded. After her untold ages of recession the moon will stand still. Then, very slowly, begin to return. By when in our sight she is equal to twenty suns, the fierce tides we shall raise on her will break her body up. She will bombard us with lunar pieces two miles, ten miles thick. The whole side of her facing the earth will burst open. She will torrent forth streams of white lava, liquid fragments larger than Sicily, to burn, bury and ravish the whole world’s face. She will split in two. Then the two halves in two, then again⁠—soon into a wild skyful of dwarf moons, moving ever closer to each other and to us, and forming at the last, to enshroud us, entomb us and adorn, a Saturn’s ring tight-encircling the earth. + 

Assuredly with a star. From the heavenly host will come the last charge of all, the ultimate cosmic concussion, and terminal collision of astral annihilation. + 

Sooner or later, in process of unwearying time (time that goes on forever), each star of heaven encounters each other star. Observed collisions are not rare; collisions unobservable from Earth must be taking place continually in the unsearched depths of the universe. One day, sooner or later, unobservable from the unsearched depths of the universe, our own collision will take place: our sun, with his whole solisequious convoy, rammed into steam by another. + 

Later, it may be. + 

The “crowded streets of space” are streets of voidness, and today, as it befalls, we are journeying along a particularly empty and uninhabited wide road. Dark unseen suns, once thought more numerous than seen ones, have, by new gravitational calculations on the speed of the latter, been reduced to the pure darkness of non-being. Of the seen ones, our three nearest neighbours, triune companions in the Centaur, are twenty-five billion miles away; the next nearest forty billion. In a circumference of some two hundred and fifty billion miles there are but four stars of us⁠—room to move without jostling. + 

None seeks to jostle. Like bees in a swarm, whom they truly resemble, stars keep out of each other’s way. From the nearest one fast moving upon us we are moving away as fast. The star we are making for, scared Vega in the Lyre, is making away in her turn. A star’s chance of collision, opines one authority (whose equations are given), is one in six hundred thousand billion, or six followed by seventeen noughts. We are as likely to crash (declares another doctor, whose calculations are however withheld) as two balloons sent up at different ends of Russia. + 

The stars have their orbits like the planets; on some regular plan, unknown but harmonious, their movements through the celestial spaces are adjusted. A collision only happens when something goes wrong: how often, how imminent, is that? + 

Sooner, it may be. + 

The streets of space are crowded; they are strewn with continual catastrophe. Of the seen stars, few no doubt at this instant are in our immediate vicinage. But the tramp stars⁠—dark suns wandering unglimpsed through the void, droves of dead worlds no equations can abolish⁠—are everywhere, more numerous than the lucid ones, as dead men than live; and it is a tramp star that our sun, then like to be a tramp star himself, is likest to encounter. + 

Not all the stars, live or dead, can be moving away from each other. In space Euclidean or non-Euclidean, in commonsense four-dimensional or three, as many must be moving nearer each other; towards disaster as away from it. + 

Some order in the star-streams, harmony of the heavens, music of the spheres, is predictable; the Empyrean as a perfect mechanism without flaw or disturbance is not. Disasters disprove it. Often, and imminently, something goes wrong. + 

Any moment we may strike a nebular stretch of heaven. Such regions are full of solid matter, stardust, in-drifting meteorites and the like. The nebula, acting as a brake on the sun’s motion, will reduce his pace at the very instant he enters an area where, other bodies being more numerous, pace to escape them is what he will chiefly need. + 

Nor, principally, is head-on collision requisite. Let another great star pass near⁠—one thousand million miles away. He will derange, de-orbit us; send us crashing, liquefying, into the riven and distorted sun. Let Antares or Arcturus, of terrible size and terrible speed, move by at tenfold, twelvefold the solar distance. The sun will be pulled into streamers, tearing forth to greet the Arcturian dragons of fire; in half-an-hour we shall be fused out of all identity, a drop in their chaos. And many a star is mightier than Arcturus; and many are nearer; many faster. One in Columba runs at two million miles an hour. + 

Sooner or later, assuredly with a star. + 

Yet collision, which thus includes grazing and mere propinquity, is too narrow a word. + 

Collision, which implies splintering impact of solid bodies, is too massive a word. + 

Collision, which, in lubberly portrayal of unliving earths in lumbering percussion, conjures up no vision of the dying crying souls upon them, is too abstract, too astronomical a word. + 

Collision, the one fate that will outstay the others, yet partakes of the nature of them all. Like the cold, irrevocable. Like the comet, coming at an hour unknown, from a direction unknown; a chance, not a process; a crash, not a geological creeping. Resembling the water-end or the waterless, according as the foe’s first deed would be to melt the mountain snows and flood us, or to parch. Resembling the fire-end; it is the Fire-End, destinate, ultimate, Sheol-Gehenna, the great balefire of combustion. + 

Collision, the one fate that destroys not only man but his home, alone is destroyer and creator. The twin cyclopean gas-streams, as they flare out across the furious infinite, will take the form of a double spiral; then of a gaseous nebula; then, condensing, of a star⁠—maybe with planets, with an earth, with us all reborn again, again long after to re-die. Death nova will be birth nova, as the nebula which gave us life was born itself of death, in the crash and ruin of life preceding. The heavenly colossal catastrophes are death; they are life. Collision makes; collision kills. + 

Out of the chance riot of stars came worlds, came living existence, came we. In new chance riot we shall depart. The heavens go crashing and whirling. The universe forms, un-forms, re-forms. The Terror rolls on. What is it? What means it? What is my soul in that universe? May God have mercy. + 

God + 

Will He have mercy? + 

Impiously our attention has all been devoted to modes of material destroying of a material world, as though no Spirit breathed through it; atheistically, only to so-called natural ways of termination. + 

There are supernatural ways. In these men have believed; each religion, each sect, each sub-sect holding its different guess as to His choice of hour, contributing its variant as to His choice of method, ready to fight or to die for its own pet terminal detail, ready to murder and martyr for a deviation or a doubt. In these men still believe. If no one now or had ever believed in them, we could not with our pygmy frail knowledge and paltry five senses rule them out. + 

Astrologers have in all ages foretold the Birthday Death: “when the fixed stars have made a revolution unto the points from whence they first set out, a kind of dying upon the day of its Nativity”⁠—prophets and peoples the End as Punishment: the natural forms of destruction, fire, flood or ice, being supernaturally sent of God, or the gods, by way of rebuke and recompense for the multitude of our iniquity, for three transgressions of Damascus and for four⁠—magicians, saints and mystics the Decreation: the sudden unframing of the worlds by the word of Him Who framed them: Fiat, a shake of the sceptre, and then Nothing. + 

God is the self and essence of each of the elements whose temporal manifestations have here been humbly unfolded. He is water, He is ice; Himself is the stars; our God is a consuming fire. He will act through these His elements not modally, to human sense perceptibly; but essentially, without circumstance, extrinsicality or phase. As it was in the beginning, when all was without form and void, till His Spirit moved upon the face of the unborn waters, + 

A moving mist, + 

A quickness which my God hath kist, + 

and hatched the world, so likewise shall it be in the end: the Spirit of God shall move upon the face of the living waters, unkiss, unquicken, decreate them, and all shall be without form, and void. As mysteriously as it began the dream will end, the mirage tumble. A magical moment, and then Nothing. + 

The strange modern people do not think so. The normal (abnormal) Western man of 1930 who swims abreast of the currents of his time, who accepts the typical teaching of his day and generation or who, learned or lewd, awarely or unawares, is influenced by it, probably does not think so. The Great Naturalistic Revolution of the past hundred years has not changed⁠—nor will the Great Relativity Revolution of the next hundred years succeed in changing⁠—the unchanged and unchangeable. Yet for some minds it has changed some large aspects of the changeable, and has given them a new conception, as “right” or as “wrong” as the conceptions from the caveman onwards that preceded it, of finite things: how these are likely, though not certain, to behave; what is their most feasible physical future. According to this conception, though the Transcendental may be there, It will not, cannot, intervene irregularly or arbitrarily in the ordered working of the given universe; in particular It will not, by miracle or deed magical, intervene in the even tenor of any finite entity, such as our own particular Milky Way or solar system or planet⁠—amongst other things to destroy it suddenly. Cannot and will not. The earth and its creatures will perish, as they arose, as part of the normal course of apparent physical nature; by so-styled natural ends, not miraculous. + 

There is no necessary conflict. Belief in the supernatural nature of the universe need not preclude belief in the natural end of this world. Belief in aboriginal God, or in the soul as a phenomenon not born of nor bound up with matter, or in unseen worlds beyond the seen one, need not exclude the expectation that the seen one will end, or appear to end, in one of such six ways as set forth in these six chapters⁠—by cold or crash or comet or whichever humanly predictable, materially describable, agency it may be. Not everyone unbelieving in Time is indifferent to what will seem to take place within its apparent limits. Not everyone convinced of spiritual reality, or of some unknown form of reality beyond spiritual reality, is convinced that physical reality is meaningless and the disappearance of its familiar shapes a fact of no interest, a phenomenon of no probability. Not everyone persuaded that only mind exists is untouched by the manner of matter’s going. Not every Dreamer scorns how the Dream will fade. Though God is God, and the Mystery unconjecturable, how and when It will put off its present garments is not unworthy man’s conjecture, a speculation with which natural science, as much as any other scheme or system, may profitably and prophetically concern herself. + 

Her type of guess may be the right one, and frost, flame or flood the end, the end of soul with body; the conclusion, together with the world visible, of the world invisible of good and evil, joy and suffering, love and terror, that has filled and formed every heart that has beaten or yet shall beat. + 

Or the magical doubters, and by their side the fundamentalists of all faiths and ages, and maybe (when the Wheel of Knowledge turns full circle) the new philosophers the newer physics will give birth to: these others may be right. Science may be a set of symbols corresponding to no reality whatever; natural law a phantasm unreliable from one hour to the next even within its own imaginary world; cause and effect, time and space, a vicious round of false notions which can never explain a world, leave alone a universe, into which they do not enter; the universe, made up of something beyond both soul and matter, a thing unpredicable and unpredictable in terms of either⁠—as God ineffable, or as Chaos finally irrational. The little world we think we see may have subsisted and subsist forever and forever; the whole cosmos vanish tonight. + 