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....

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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 which force mortal intelligence to recoil upon itself at every fresh attempt to pass the barrier of the Knowable.  Were that barrier unexpectedly pushed back,—­were knowledge to be suddenly and vastly expanded beyond its present limits,—­perhaps we should find ourselves unable to endure the revelation....

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Mr. Percival Lowell’s astonishing book, “Mars,” sets one to thinking about the results of being able to hold communication with the habitants of an older and a wiser world,—­some race of beings more highly evolved than we, both intellectually and morally, and able to interpret a thousand mysteries that still baffle our science.  Perhaps, in such event, we should not find ourselves able to comprehend the methods, even could we borrow the results, of wisdom older than all our civilization by myriads or hundreds of myriads of years.  But would not the sudden advent of larger knowledge from some elder planet prove for us, by reason, of the present moral condition of mankind, nothing less than a catastrophe?—­might it not even result in the extinction of the human species?...