This infinite is not rhetorical, as if we spoke of infinite thought or infinite love:  it is physico-mathematical.  Nothing but number, M. Benda tells us, seems to him intelligible.  Time, space, volume, and complexity (which appears to the senses as quality) stretch in a series of units, positions, or degrees, to infinity, as number does:  and in such homogeneous series, infinite in both directions, there will be no fixed point of origin for counting or surveying the whole and no particular predominant scale.  Every position will be essentially identical with every other; every suggested structure will be collapsible and reversible; and the position and relations of every unit will be indistinguishable from those of every other.  In the infinite, M. Benda says, the parts have no identity:  each number in the scale, as we begin counting from different points of origin, bears also every other number.

This is no mere mathematical puzzle; the thought has a strange moral eloquence.  Seen in their infinite setting, which we may presume to be their ultimate environment, all things lose their central position and their dominant emphasis.  The contrary of what we first think of them or of ourselves—­for instance that we are alive, while they are dead or unborn—­is also true.  Egotism becomes absurd; pride and shame become the vainest of illusions.  If then it be repugnant to reason that the series of numbers, moments, positions, and volumes should be limited—­and the human spirit has a great affinity to the infinite—­all specific quality and variety in things must be superficial and deeply unreal.  They are masks in the carnival of phenomena, to be observed without conviction, and secretly dismissed as ironical by those who have laid up their treasure in the infinite.

This mathematical dissolution of particulars is reinforced by moral considerations which are more familiar.  Existence—­any specific fact asserting itself in any particular place or moment—­is inevitably contingent, arbitrary, gratuitous, and insecure.  A sense of insecurity is likely to be the first wedge by which repentance penetrates into the animal heart.  If a man did not foresee death and fear it, he might never come at all to the unnatural thought of renouncing life.  In fact, he does not often remember death:  yet his whole gay world is secretly afraid of being found out, of being foiled in the systematic bluff by which it lives as if its life were immortal; and far more than the brave young man fears death in his own person, the whole life of the world fears to be exorcised by self-knowledge, and lost in air.  And with good reason:  because, whether we stop to notice this circumstance or not, every fact, every laborious beloved achievement of man or of nature, has come to exist against infinite odds.  In the dark grab-bag of Being, this chosen fact was surrounded by innumerable possible variations or contradictions of it; and each of those possibilities, happening