sudden ecstasy
Of thought that time and space annihilates,
Creation in a moment uncreates,
And whirls the mind, from secular habit free,
Beyond the spheres, beyond infinity,
Beyond the empery of the eternal Fates,
To where the Inconceivable ruminates,
The unthinkable "To be or not to be?"
Then, as Existence flickers into sight,
A marsh-flame in the night of Nothingness--
The great, soft, restful, dreamless, fathomless night--
We know the Affirmative the primal curse,
And loathe, with all its imbecile strain and stress,
This ostentatious, vulgar Universe.

The mood here recorded is one that must be familiar to most thinking
people. "The undevout astronomer is mad," said eighteenth-century
deism: to-day we are more apt to think that the uncritical astronomer
is dense. There is a sort of colossal stupidity about the stars in
their courses that overpowers and disquiets us. If (as Alfred Russel
Wallace has argued) the geocentric theory was not so far out after
all, and the earth, holding a specially favored place in the universe,
is the only home of life, then the disproportion of mechanism to
result seems absolutely appalling. If, on the other hand, all the
million million of suns are pouring out vital heat to a like number
of inhabited planetary systems, the sheer quantity of life, of
struggle, of suffering implied, seems a thought at which to shudder.
We are inclined to say to the inventor of sentience: "Since this
ingenious combination of yours was at best such a questionable boon,
surely you might have been content with one experiment."

But all such criticism rests upon a fallacy, or rather a brace of
interrelated fallacies. There can be no disproportion between
consciousness and the unconscious, because they are absolutely
incommensurable; and number, in relation to consciousness, is an
illusion. Consciousness, wherever it exists, is single, indivisible,
inextensible; and other consciousnesses, and the whole external
universe, are, to the individual percipient, but shapes in a more or
less protracted dream.

Why should we trouble about vastness--mere extension in space? There
is a sense in which the infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more
disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the
phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all
the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about the
bigness and the littlenes