The thought of a planet can only be
worked out by nature with labor and effort, but supreme intelligence
sums up the whole in an instant. Time is then the successive dispersion
of being, just as speech is the successive analysis of an intuition or
of an act of will. In itself it is relative and negative, and disappears
within the absolute being. God is outside time because he thinks all
thought at once; Nature is within time, because she is only speech--the
discursive unfolding of each thought contained within the infinite
thought. But nature exhausts herself in this impossible task, for the
analysis of the infinite is a contradiction. With limitless duration,
boundless space, and number without end, Nature does at least what she
can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula.
By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the
effort--the unsuccessful effort--to house and contain the eternal
thought, we may measure the greatness of the divine mind. For as soon as
this mind goes out of itself and seeks to explain itself, the effort at
utterance heaps universe upon universe, during myriads of centuries, and
still it is not expressed, and the great harangue must go on for ever
and ever.
The East prefers immobility as the form of the Infinite: the West,
movement.
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