, may be maintained for centuries as
religions are maintained, institutionally; but a movement comes to an end;
it is followed presently by a period of assimilation which transforms it,
or by a movement in some other direction. I ask myself accordingly whether
the condition of the world in the coming years will be favourable to
refined and paradoxical science. The extension of education will have
enabled the uneducated to pronounce upon everything. Will the patronage of
capital and enterprise subsist, to encourage discovery and reward
invention? Will a jealous and dogmatic democracy respect the
unintelligible insight of the few? Will a perhaps starving democracy
support materially its Soviet of seers? But let us suppose that no
utilitarian fanaticism supervenes, and no intellectual surfeit or
discouragement. May not the very profundity of the new science and its
metaphysical affinities lead it to bolder developments, inscrutable to the
public and incompatible with one another, like the gnostic sects of
declining antiquity? Then perhaps that luminous modern thing which until
recently was called science, in contrast to all personal philosophies, may
cease to exist altogether, being petrified into routine in the
practitioners, and fading in the professors into abstruse speculations.

IV

A LONG WAY ROUND TO NIRVANA

That the end of life is death may be called a truism, since the various
kinds of immortality that might perhaps supervene would none of them
abolish death, but at best would weave life and death together into the
texture of a more comprehensive destiny. The end of one life might be the
beginning of another, if the Creator had composed his great work like a
dramatic poet, assigning successive lines to different characters. Death
would then be merely the cue at the end of each speech, summoning the next
personage to break in and keep the ball rolling. Or perhaps, as some
suppose, all the characters are assumed in turn by a single supernatural
Spirit, who amid his endless improvisations is imagining himself living
for the moment in this particular solar and social system. Death in such a
universal monologue would be but a change of scene or of metre, while in
the scramble of a real comedy it would be a change of actors. In either
case every voice would be silenced sooner or later, and death would end
each particular life, in spite of all possible sequels.

The relapse of created things into nothing is n