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