The End of the World by Geoffrey Dennis

Author:Geoffrey Dennis
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Philosophy, End of the world
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2026-01-01T16:00:34+00:00

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All of which proves, as it dis­proves, noth­ing. Num­ber, as long ago the Py­thagoreans saw, is bound up with the in­most nature of real­ity; is near­er real­ity than time or space, which our teach­ers are now dis­card­ing. Num­ber they can­not dis­card: three is three, sev­enty sev­enty, at any speed, in any frame of ref­er­ence, un­der any the­ory of post-Ein­stein­i­an space-time. It is a first con­stitu­ent of be­ing. It is a lost sense, still stir­ring faintly in our blood and brain, stir­ring like mu­sic, whose soul it is; a true mode of the mys­tery, re­jec­ted, for­got­ten awhile; a dwell­er in the in­ner­most, per­haps the In­ner­most It­self.

Of all mys­ter­ies it is the most mys­ter­i­ous. 256 is two to the eighth power, 257 prime and power­less. 142,856 is noth­ing, 142,857 a ma­gi­cian that no oth­er till the thou­sands of the tril­lions can equal—take a pen­cil and his secrets en­kab­bal­ize the pa­per. … Of all phe­nom­ena it is the most flaw­lessly in­fin­ite. One, two, three—and a hare is star­ted that runs to Etern­ity, off on a path that tran­scends the uni­verse, for the uni­verse may be fi­nite but the num­ber of num­bers is not. Count forever and you reach no last num­ber, which is bey­ond forever. … Two and two make four. Is it only a jar­gon, an­swer­ing to no real­ity? Two things ad­ded to two things do not make four of the same things, no two things be­ing the same, neither worlds nor men, neither grains of sand nor galax­ies nor hu­man hopes. Or, not a qual­ity of things nor re­la­tion between them, but a sym­bol cor­res­pond­ing to the real­ity be­hind them; a be­ing on its own, be­fore and after real­ity? In con­tem­pla­tion of num­bers, ab­stract and con­crete, or­din­al and car­din­al, and of all the half-glimpsed har­mon­ies they dom­in­ate—mu­sic, mu­sic of the spheres, the chem­ic­al ele­ments, the phys­ic­al atoms, arith­met­ic, as­tro­nomy, the signs of Satan, the wounds of God—some­times we are trans­por­ted to a mood, a place, where the mys­tery in­vades and trans­forms; we see the oth­er, the ul­ti­mate ex­ist­ence around us, in sane moods un­guessed at. Our hearts can­not bear the beauty of ter­ror; we fall back in­to the dream, in­to life.

The chili­asts and the Rab­bis and the Bible-delvers were poor bungling work­men; but their prin­ciple is surely right. One day the as­tro­nomers, now so dis­dain­ful, will com­plete the work they were not equal to, and vin­dic­ate the prin­ciple. When the ex­act past mo­tions of all the stars shall be known, when the whole pre­his­tory of heav­en shall be re­vealed, cos­mo­lo­gists will cal­cu­late far back­ward till they find in what year and what hour the star our fath­er struck or passed tid­ally by; the year and the num­ber of the be­gin­ning. When the ex­act fu­ture mo­tions of all the stars shall be known, when every fact about sun’s, moon’s and earth’s move­ment and mass, tempo and tem­per­at­ure, shall be garnered and veri­fied, then they will cal­cu­late far for­ward till they find the clock-mo­ment of the crash or cold; the year and the num­ber of the end.

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