Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/424

408 and maintained that they deserved to be thoroughly wretched. Whilst others asserted, that being entirely relieved from movement, theirs must be a state of perfect blessedness, their whole faculties being absorbed in contemplation. In the midst of these discussions the process of jellification was advancing more and more rapidly, and in ten thousand years the whole of infinite fluidity throughout all space, with all its myriads of Beings embedded in it, was transformed into this new form of space. From the description conveyed to me by the Spirit, I should infer that the whole of what we call infinite space had now become more nearly like blancmange than any other sub-aërial substance.

(c.) After a state of repose of many hundred thousand years a new catastrophe occurred. Space became too large even for itself. It then suffered, for many hundred thousand years, enormous compression. During this long period all its embedded Spirits perished, and space itself, during six hundred thousand years, became one vast and solid desert, containing no living beings.

But the vast periods of the past were as nothing compared with the long series of cycles which now succeeded—each in itself comprising millions of years.

About this time recorded history began, and is believed, by the Spirit with whom I was in conference, to be as authentic as the nature of the circumstances admit.

One solitary survivor seems to have escaped the crash of systems and the condensation of space. He proceeded to cut himself into two parts, and to advise each part to follow out the same course, directing them to transmit the command of their first parent throughout all time. Alone, in the midst of infinite solidity, the newly-severed beings, setting themselves back to back, exerted force. Thus urged, matter itself gave