What After?

For terrible multitudes of years the stars have been pouring forth their light; the Universe has been melting away.

Since energy turns always into heat, and since heat passes always from a warmer body to a colder, there is always available less energy in the Universe, whose temperature is always levelling up.

In the end no lucid atoms will be left; the transmission of energy will have ceased; entropy, the final equalization of temperature, will be accomplished; the clock will have run down. All life, light, movement, vibration will be over, in soundless motionless eternal total night: the calorific death of the Universe: the Wärmetod.

The mind rebels.

Could not the cyclic collisions, systole and diastole of worlds, release fresh energy forever?⁠—They are mere accidents, incidents, powerless to stem or deflect the stream ineluctable of sidereal evolution. They are dying flares, each time paltrier.

Could not inequality⁠—movement⁠—life⁠—in some way start again, some cosmic accident after untold ages somehow, as a spark dead gunpowder, fire the dark equilibrium?⁠—Entropy is irreversible. There is no opposite process. The universe is a mechanism transforming energy into heat, never to the same extent heat back into energy. Matter turns into light, not light into matter; life into death, not death into life.

Heat is only one source and mode of movement; why should temperature equilibrium spell total equilibrium? Why, life being a mystery beyond mechanics, must physical death spell psychical death?⁠—If heat goes, existence goes, spiritual and material, in this world and other worlds.

Irreversibility, if true of finite systems, why true for infinite space?⁠—Space is not infinite. Leave Neptune behind and, cutting a path through the void, strike for the nearest star: Proxima Centauri, but twenty-six million million miles away, four years as light travels. Thence, still in the same shrunk suburb of the cosmos, traverse the Milky Way, through darkness, past single suns, binary suns, steady and variable suns, dwarf and giant suns, protean families of suns, through droves and broods of suns, great blazing archipelagos of suns, some yellow like ours, some green, some red or indigo; through darkness again; out beyond the last galactical confines, through icy mists of Magellanic nebulae, on into new stanchless clusters of furious worlds and desolate emptiness, through more millions of stars and more billions of miles and most trillions of desolate emptiness, fresh terrible oceans of dividing darkness, on to new Milky Ways, lone island-universes of prodigal immensity.⁠ ⁠… To the weary feet and terrified heart space seems infinite indeed. But though it be of size unimaginable, microscopically, macroscopically; though every drop of water or grain of sand be itself an island-universe, every molecule a constellation, every atom a solar system with electrons revolving round protons like planets around suns; though each solar system in its turn be an atom, each heavenly constellation a molecule, each Milky Way a grain of sand in its own Milky Way; though from Mount Wilson, through the great telescope there, they behold stars which shine, or rather once shone, one hundred and forty million light-years away, and behold two million extragalactic nebulae, a fraction of those ere long to be revealed, each with its myriad stars and chiliad systems, each a wild universe on its own; though number and size and removedness thus tower and riot and appal⁠—yet no such series of wandering miles and wearying zeros attains infinity. De Sitter’s toy world is a sphere (Einstein’s a cylinder), space bending back on itself; and, while a thousand million times bigger than the trillion-mile pitiful corner seen from Mount Wilson⁠—so big that light, swiftest of all things, takes one hundred thousand million years to go round it and come back to the starting-point, to our sun, ghost of a sun; our earth, ghost of an earth; ourselves, ghosts of ourselves⁠—yet no bigger, and so short of infinity.

To an infinite Universe the calorific death might come or might not; to this finite Universe, the Universe that is, in irreversibility of entropy it must.

The soul rebels.

The Universe shall not die! Space shall be infinite. That whole cosmos of theirs, which embraces the uttermost nebulae, which sweeps a thousand million times wider than the trillion-mile pitiful corner seen from Mount Wilson, around which light, swiftest of all things, takes one hundred thousand million years to travel, it is but a bubble enwombed in the ether, in empty ether stretching out to infinity. And entropy of infinity is a phrase that has no sense⁠—no, not even in transcendental physics. The law of degradation breaks down. We are saved.

Light can reconstitute matter; can build up stars to start all over again. It is last year’s newest evangel.

Entropy is only an average, a probability, and so must sometimes fail; as sometimes heat does pass from cold nebulae to warmer stars, as one day those apes will ride the Tempest, and red outrun black even till it break the heavenly bank.

If Wärmetod must happen, why has it not happened already, happened always? If the calorific stillness were inevitable it must, unless the fundamental laws have changed, unless temperature was once infinitely irregular⁠—which is not sense, no not even in thermodynamics⁠—have come long ago, been eternally. There must always have been entropy; there can never have been a Universe.⁠—Yet one is there; here.

Here for an hour; and here because it is not infinite, no more in time than in space. It could escape the warmth-death only to die the time-death. Either way, every way, the Clock runs down.

What started the Clock? Who? How? And before? And after?

We are beaten. We revolve on a wheel; scuttle round in a trap.

The world must have perished, the world is here⁠—this antithesis between reasoned theory and apprehended fact, between on the one side the indirect inevitable-seeming consequence of a system devised by our brains and on the other side the direct deliverance of our senses, is a shadow of that sharper antithesis, the antithesis between things as delivered by our senses and things as they are. The world of indirect apprehension or scientific description⁠—the world that this book is full of⁠—is one step yet farther than the sham world of direct apprehension from whatever reality may be; it is a self-contained world of imagination, a mythical mechanism working itself, worked by itself; expounding, in a circle vicious and aimless, one set of phenomena it assumes in terms of other such phenomena; and having, except at the place or moment, where the brain seizes hold of the deliverance of the senses as raw material for its constructions, no contact again with even the mock-show of appearance, still less with the reality beyond⁠—if there be one. Atoms and molecules, solar shapes and nebulae; fire and water, cold and collision; matter and energy, millions and millionths; time and space, past and future; first cause and final outcome, End and No End: all are names, words, counters, symbols, wraiths, thin-spun abstractions of abstractions. Science is a shorthand based on these symbols, a game played with these counters, a creed recited with these words, an incantation formed with these names, a metrical ghost-world filled with these gibbering wraiths, the arch-abstraction refined from these abstractions of abstractions.

Its so-called facts are interpretative guesses. Its so-called laws are invented by our minds, not presented by the things themselves. Were our minds different, the apparent world would be different, and its apparent laws. Suppose we were one sense short, blind every one of us. Then the Universe we should apprehend would be a different Universe, while in itself remaining (perhaps) the same Universe. Suppose we had one sense more. Then the cosmos would be different again, a place now unimagined and unimaginable, though still itself remaining (who knows?) the same cosmos. Suppose thought were different, other than analytic, eclectic; suppose it worked differently, with quite other symbols; suppose it could think something other than thought. Then the world it would build would be another world, leaving elsewhere (or nowhere?) the real world. Worlds, like wine, take the shape of the bottle they’re poured into. We are the bottles. The world believed in has no being but in our brain that edifies it; it is an artificial construction made up of arbitrary signs, themselves made up by the narrowly selective machinery of our mind with the raw material supplied by our narrowly selective senses. The seen world, if one step less distant from it than the science world, is not the world. Which is unknown.

Can it ever be known? Is the Universe knowable at all: the real scheme corresponding to the sham scheme in which the symbols figure?

If the world were knowable it would not be itself; if it were knowable for ourselves we should not be ourselves. Acatalepsy makes equation with agnosticism, the object’s incapability of being known with the subject’s incapability of knowing. At most, our knowledge is of structure not contents; of dream-shape not dream-substance; of how imaginary things seem to fit together, not what real things are. The Universe-in-itself, being unlike anything we can think, may be the opposite: Antichthon, Counter-Earth, with matter spirit, and the past the future. We may be the wine, and the world the bottle; knowable to the Universe, though not it to us. Life may be emergent in matter, a waste product, of matter, a last phase of dying matter, or matter may be the dead deposit of life; matter may be a configuration of our brains or our brains a configuration of matter; reality may be what we call matter plus what we call soul; or it may be matter without soul, or soul without matter, or neither, or some other mixture of both, or a symbiosis of one with some other thing than the other.⁠ ⁠… Back in the prison-house! Round in the trap! What are “matter,” “life,” “soul”? What are “we”?

How can we know? No juggling with the counters can help us to know.

Can any other method of approach? Can religion? When not a bare system of life or government, a mere ethical programme or aesthetic cult, but when reigning in her home province as sovereign remedy for and minister to the metaphysical ills and needs of man, she utters the magical name of God. Who avails us little. For He is not God. He is our own invention, a man-made figure of God, an idol made with minds; a token, a terrible toy, a word of thunder deafening us to the emptiness within, a prisoner with us in the circle our senses go round in. Unless the Circle Itself.

Mysticism? Whether luminous under the banner of one religion or another, or of none, she takes the soul nearest to understanding, or the illusion of understanding; to high telepathy with the Unknown God. Conducting her favourites⁠—her victims?⁠—beyond the borderland of sensuous experience, she leaves them an instant there, translated, in nameless ecstasy or nameless terror, for an instant there to know the unknowable; without the circle of themselves, within His arms. They come back, and tell little. Only that the beauty, or the horror, was absolute; only that the experience was authentic, noëtic, as no other experience ever was or could be; only adjectives decking the soon-faded memory of their glimpse beyond. What they saw, they cannot tell. Did they see anything? Anything beyond shadows of the Shadow?

Strange ways are theirs of squaring the Circle: contemplation of His Person or Passion; eating His hidden manna; drinking His precious blood; kissing His cross, bearing it; dervish devices⁠—repetition of the same word or same whirl; mad child’s devices⁠—stare into the mirror, kiss your own lips there, think “Jesus” forever. Thus too the wild expectation arises, and nearer, nearer⁠—almost, all but⁠—the mystery is uncovered. It is illusion; and perfect is the illusion that it is not illusion.

Mysticism like mechanism, religion like reason, all are prisoners. What the Universe is can never be known. We are in it, we are of it, we are it; but what it is we do not know, world without beginning, world without end. The reality is unseizable, unapproachable, indefinable, in the most ultimate sense ineffable. The mystery, the misery, is forever.

Is the Universe real?

For the solipsist nothing exists apart from himself, and he is the only reality; he imagines the world, he himself makes it. When he dies the world dies; his brain projected it. No hope in spiritualist hopes of the soul’s survival: survival after this life, even to a thousand lifetimes, holds no promise of life eternal. With the death of the last disembodied spirit⁠—instead of the last man alive⁠—the world, as projection of his spirit, then would die.

Should however the solipsist be wrong, and the world exist on its own, then are there two things uncomprehended instead of one, and duality of ignorance. Or should the world be multiple, a manyness not unity, a complex of numberless planes or levels compresent at the same time though unperceived each by the other, then an eternity of things uncomprehended, and cosmic infinity of mutual ignorance. Sometimes the different planes seem to guess or grope at each other’s existence, as when, at this present moment, mind is wedded to matter and together they constitute life; as when, in the love moment, two together become one; as when, in nirvana, we taste and see the Lord; as when, in pari-nirvana, God tastes and sees Himself. Mostly the levels stay alone, unknowing and unknown of the others⁠—like those electric currents that, though they have power to flame cities, pass through our bodies unobserved; like that magnet which could lift a steel mightiness but not my little finger; like the spirits around us whom so few perceive; like the finite, unperceived by the infinite⁠—straight parallel lines through the magic.

Ghost lines, not real ones.

Is the Universe rational?

Evidence of some plan or scheme, of a certain order within certain ordered limits, of a measure of presiding harmony, is considerable; to minds which forget they are cage-bound, and give to the pattern of their bars the name of Reason, it appears overwhelming. Yet gravitation may fail tonight, time run backwards, and the whole cosmos, like a nightmare sky, tear asunder or tumble together in hideous confusion and lunatic chaos. The laws, if any, are not the laws our minds have made; but there may be no laws. The vision we think we perceive⁠—of good and evil irregularly jumbled, joy and pain unjustly apportioned, lovely children starving who peer through the window at Wickedness who feasts within, God in the slave’s face and Satan in the slaver’s, one event to the just and the unjust, no reward for endeavour and reward for no endeavour, confusion on earth and collision in heaven, purpose frustrated among the stars as in our hearts certitude of sorrow, conjecturality of glory⁠—gives no evidence of any plan, moral or logical or mechanical, if no proofs against one. There can be no proofs either way, and no probable inferences.

If no Reason, has it reasons?

That mankind, its climax, might be achieved? That the power of the devil should be shown forth? That the glory of the Lord shall be revealed? Some elysian goal, unrevealed, unrevealing, unrevealable? Or no reason, no purpose? Ideas from the trap.

Is the Universe alive?

Conscious, in supernal analogy to our kind of consciousness? Do earth and sun in dying have agony? Does consciousness accompany all material change: rock decaying, comet frittering, moons forming, stars crashing? Does Space suffer; does Number feel? Does the world that comprises them all know that it is alive, feel that it is alive, look inwards, and backwards and forwards, at its holistic Self? Is it fighting for its life, as we all fight? Are we, as we fight for our lives, it fighting for its? If alive, will it die?

It is not conscious, nor unconscious. It is not suffering, nor unsuffering. It is not alive, nor dead. It is not there.

Is the Universe Time?

In Orphic cosmogony it was Chronos who laid the world-egg. For Heraclitus, Time was like an eternal river, and that river the world. By one latter-day scheme of geometrical metaphysics, point-instants, offspring of Time out of Space, are the last realities; in each of these the instant is the mind of its point, and taking the whole Universe, which is the sum total of point-instants, Time is the mind of Space. Under some other philosophies, Time⁠—or Space-Time⁠—is as the field or framework within which Energy, for them the last reality, is exercising itself; the setting or background of the Universe.⁠ ⁠… What they mean, the strange doctors of the strange doctrines⁠—idealist and realist, objective and subjective, physical and metaphysical, mathematical and psychological⁠—who tug at the mantle of Chronos and send his scythe swerving through nightmare, what they tell: who knows? They tell nothing of what Time is.

It is not. Who shall discover it? Did it begin? Will it end?⁠—Time flies. Who shall put plummets upon its flying feet? If tonight it should go ten times swifter or ten times slower, who would know? The properties it would have if it existed⁠—unity, simultaneity, omneity⁠—these it has not. Great Nebula in Orion is seen as it was a thousand centuries ago, not as it is now; as it is now, it will be seen (if any shall see) a thousand centuries ahead. The brightest stars and biggest nebulae of all are not yet perceived, whose light has not yet reached us; or the dimmest stars may be the nearest, seen through space backwards. But no star, as no other thing, has ever been seen as it is. There is no is; only a timeless becoming. There is no Time: only times and times. Time is a deduction, a derivation, a delusion; a trick on the trickster; a prisoner in prisoners’ minds.

Is the Universe infinite?

Finite or infinite, both are inconceivable. Brains nor hearts can imagine neither edge nor rim, end nor beginning; nor can imagine the world without margin or limit, without beginning or end. Both are totally equally irrevocably inconceivable.

If it be infinite, then either cyclic or evolutionary. Either the same heavens and the same earth shall return perpetually, or Behold! I create a new heaven and a new earth. Either each one of the possible combinations of lines or atoms or movements will one day recur, and again recur, and forever recur; the whole present configuration of the whole in every particular and detail reappear, disappear, again reappear, and so on through the endless nightmare ahead as it has appeared, disappeared, reappeared in the beginningless nightmare behind. This was the thought that enabled Socrates to abide Xanthippe’s tongue with patience, and without fear to face the hemlock. Or else, in the direction in which Time is going (its one open end, the future) the Universe is creating itself. From shapes inconceivable, lower than matter, to matter; from matter to life, life to mind, mind to man, the cosmos has walked onwards and worked upwards. The pilgrimage of being will continue: from man to God, God to shapes ineffable, beyond divinity.⁠ ⁠… This is the thought that comforts Socrates’ successors today.

If it be finite: then⁠—spirit and matter being different aspects of the same thing, same movement, same finite contents⁠—the law of death and degradation must apply to both. Physical entropy will include psychical entropy, matter-death spirit-death. It is the supernatural stalemate, the Wärmetod of Souls.

Is the Universe old?

If thus finite, is it nearing its end?

Of all the matter that must once have filled it, the greater part has spent itself in radiation, and only a little part remains. Calculate the light that there was in the beginning and the light that since has shone forth. Twenty-three parts of it have been beamed away, is the surmise, and a twenty-fourth part of it is still to spend. Twenty-three twenty-fourths of Time is over; it is eleven at Universe-night.

The world’s lamps are flickering, and no oil and no light are to buy. Behold the Bridegroom cometh.

Is the Universe terrible?

No sense capping Yea with Nay and Nay with Yea. Each soul must answer for itself. Some there are who see Glory not as the foil, the predestined victim, the glittering shadow of Evil, but as the soul and substance prevailing. I know Evil the more powerful; the positive and pervasive force. Sometimes I am filled with it, sick with it, mad with loathing and agony and horror⁠—pursued, obsessed, surrounded by the nameless infinite shape which hunts my soul, and which some call the Devil but which I fear may be the King. Worst is the realized fact of existence itself, the fact that I am alive, that there is a world, that there ever has been a world, ever has been Anything. Here no pity, no loophole, no hidden door of hope. No saviour can unmake that, ever made, I am made for evermore; no judge can commute my sentence of life into sentence of death. No trick, no faith, can assuage; can alter that, having been, I have been; and am, and shall be, I Geoffrey, for evermore. A tremor through all my body; I know He is coming. I turn pale; my spirit trembles⁠—a weak prayer for courage to face Him. The cold wind from the mystery of darkness blows through my heart; then He seizes my soul; I am delivered over. Frozen with everlasting terror I look into His Eyes, and through them forever into space and time forever. I scream in my heart for eternity. Sometimes no sound escapes me; I have taught my will to stifle it; I may be in company, in the midst of friendly or frivolous talk. Uttered or unuttered, the moan in my heart continues to madness-place; then stops. The vision vanishes. Blood rushes back through my veins; then a moment almost of pleasure, warm joy of deliverance.

Is the Universe God?

His body it is, crucified for us, for which we are crucified. His Spirit it is, Which we apprehend with fear, worship and love pushed to that place⁠—plane, state, moment (no words)⁠—wherein we behold and, in final translation, ourselves become the Living God.

Is there, was there ever, a Universe?

It is a dream. A dream of a dream, dream within dream forever, with no reality ever behind. Even the dream is an illusion; an illusion that it is a dream, an illusion that it is not a dream, an illusion that the dream, dream or not, is being dreamt, dream within dream forever.

It is not the dream but the Dreamer, Who Himself forever is dreamt. The joy and the truth is Zero, Non-Being, Nihility.

There is no Universe.