d
shun the eternal touch of It;--there is furthermore the tremendous
conviction that could the Self of me rush with the swiftness of
light,--with more than the swiftness of light,--beyond all galaxies,
beyond durations of time so vast that Science knows no sign by which
their magnitudes might be indicated,--and still flee onward, onward,
downward, upward,--always, always,--never could that Self of me reach
nearer to any verge, never speed farther from any centre. For, in that
Silence, all vastitude and height and depth and time and direction are
swallowed up: relation therein could have no meaning but for the speck
of my fleeting consciousness,--atom of terror pulsating alone through
atomless, soundless, nameless, illimitable potentiality.

And the idea of that potentiality awakens another quality of
horror,--the horror of infinite Possibility. For this Inscrutable that
pulses through substance as if substance were not at all,--so subtly
that none can feel the flowing of its tides, yet so swiftly that no
life-time would suffice to count the number of the oscillations which
it makes within the fraction of one second,--thrills to us out of
endlessness;--and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor;
the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. To that
phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a
universe were equally facile: here it caresses the eye with the charm
and illusion of color; there it bestirs into being a cluster of
giant suns. All that human mind is capable of conceiving as possible
(and how much also that human mind must forever remain incapable of
conceiving?) may be wrought anywhere, everywhere, by a single tremor
of that Abyss....

* * * * *

Is it true, as some would have us believe, that the fear of the
extinction of self is the terror supreme?... For the thought of
personal perpetuity in the infinite vortex is enough to evoke sudden
trepidations that no tongue can utter,--fugitive instants of a horror
too vast to enter wholly into consciousness: a horror that can be
endured in swift black glimpsings only. And the trust that we are one
with the Absolute--dim points of thrilling in the abyss of It--can
prove a consoling faith only to those who find themselves obliged to
think that consciousness dissolves with the crumbling of the brain....
It seems to me that few (or none) dare to utter frankly those
stupendous doubts and fears