Omega - Camille Flammarion (free ebooks for android txt) 📗

eternity a hundred million years, a thousand million years or centuries, are as a day. There is an eternity behind us and before us, and all apparent duration is but a point. A scientific investigation of nature and acquaintance with its laws raises, therefore, the question already raised by the theologians, whether Plato, Zoroaster, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, or some young seminarist who has just taken orders: “What was God doing before the creation of the universe, and what will he do after its end?” Or, under a less anthromorphic form, since God is unknowable: “What was the condition of the universe prior to the present order of things, and what will it be after this order has passed away?”

Note that the question is the same, whether we admit a personal God, reasoning and acting toward a definite end, or, whether we deny the existence of any spiritual being, and admit only the existence of indestructible atoms and forces representing an invariable sum of energy.

In the first case, why should God, an eternal and uncreated power, remain inactive? Or, having remained inactive, satisfied with the absolute infinity of his nature which nothing could augment, why did he change this state and create matter and force?

The theologian may reply: “Because it was his good pleasure.” But philosophy is not satisfied with this change in the divine purpose. In the second case, since the origin of the present condition of things only dates back a certain time, and since there can be no effect without a cause, we have the right to ask what was the condition of things anterior to the formation of the present universe.

Although energy is indestructible, we certainly cannot deny the tendency toward its universal dissipation, and this must lead to absolute repose and death, for the conclusions of mathematics are irresistible.

Nevertheless, we do not concede this.

Why?

Because the universe is not a definite quantity.

Ω

It is impossible to conceive of a limit to the extension of matter. Limitless space, the inexhaustible source of the transformation of potential energy into visible motion, and thence into heat and other forces, confronts us, and not a simple, finished piece of mechanism, running like a clock and stopping forever.

The future of the universe is its past. If the universe were to have had an end, this end would have been reached long ago, and we should not be here to study this problem.

It is because our conceptions are finite, that things have a beginning and an end. We cannot conceive of an absolutely endless series of transformations, either in the future or in the past, nor that an equally endless series of material combinations, of planets, suns, sun-systems, milky ways, stellar universes, can succeed each other. Nevertheless, the heavens are there to show us the infinite. Nor can we comprehend any better the infinity of space or of time; yet it is impossible for us to conceive of a limit to either, for our thought overleaps the limit, and is impotent to conceive of bounds beyond which there is no space nor time. One may travel forever, in any direction, without reaching a boundary, and as soon as anyone affirms that at a certain moment duration ceases, we refuse our assent; for we cannot confound time with the human measures of it.

These measures are relative and arbitrary; but time itself exists, like space, independently of them. Suppress everything, space and time would still remain; that is to say, space which material things may occupy, and the possibility of the succession of events. If this were not so, neither space nor time would be really measurable, not even in thought, since thought would not exist. But it is impossible for the mind even to suppress either the one or the other. Strictly speaking, it is neither space nor time that we are speaking of, but infinity and eternity, relative to which every measure, however great, is but a point.

We do not comprehend or conceive of infinite space or time, because we are incapable of it. But this incapacity does not invalidate the existence of the absolute. In confessing that we do not comprehend infinity, we feel it about us, and that space, as bounded by a wall or any barrier whatever, is in itself an absurd idea. And we are equally incapable of denying the possibility of the existence, at some instant of time, of a system of worlds whose motions would measure time without creating it. Do our clocks create time? No, they do but measure it. In the presence of the absolute, our measures of both time and space vanish; but the absolute remains.

We live, then, in the infinite, without doubting it for an instant. The hand which holds this pen is composed of eternal and indestructible elements, and the atoms which constituted it existed in the solar nebula whence our planet came, and will exist forever. Your lungs breathe, your brains think, with matter and forces which acted millions of years ago and will act endlessly. And the little globule which we inhabit floats, not at the center of a limited universe, but in the depth of infinity, as truly as does the most distant star which the telescope can discover.

The best definition of the universe ever given, to which there was nothing to add, is Pascal’s, “A sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

It is this infinity which assures the eternity of the universe.

Stars, systems, myriads, milliards, universes succeed each other without end in every direction.

We do not live near a center which does not exist, and the Earth, like the farthest star, lies in the fathomless infinite.

No bounds to space. Fly in thought in any direction with any velocity for months, years, centuries, forever, we shall meet with no limit, approach no boundary, we shall always remain in the vestibule of the infinite before us.

No bounds to time. Live in imagination through future ages, add centuries to centuries, epoch to epoch, we shall never