y. The working of the mind gives rise to a possible
infinity that is limitless: it thus traces a route for the movement of
the imagination. The number, or rather the series of numbers, is less an
object than a vehicle.

This form of imagination is produced in two principal ways--in religious
conceptions and cosmogonies, and in science.

(1) Numerical imagination has nowhere been more exuberant than among the
peoples of the Orient. They have played with number with magnificent
audacity and prodigality. Chaldean cosmogony relates that _Oannes_, the
Fish-god, devoted 259,200 years to the education of mankind, then came a
period of 432,000 years taken up with the reigns of mythical personages,
and at the end of these 691,000 years, the deluge renewed the face of the
earth. The Egyptians, also, were liberal with millions of years, and in
the face of the brief and limited chronology of the Greeks (another kind
of imagination) were wont to exclaim, "You, O Greeks, you are only
children!" But the Hindoos have done better than all that. They have
invented enormous units to serve as basis and content for their numerical
fancies: the _Koti_, equivalent to ten millions; the _Kalpa_ (or the age
of the world between two destructions), 4,328,000,000 years. Each _Kalpa_
is merely one of 365 days of divine life: I leave to the reader, if he is
so inclined, the work of calculating this appalling number. The Djanas
divide time into two periods, one ascending, the other descending: each is
of fabulous duration, 2,000,000,000,000,000 oceans of years; each ocean
being itself equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000 years. "If there were a
lofty rock, sixteen miles in each dimension, and one touched it once in a
hundred years with a bit of the finest Benares linen, it would be reduced
to the size of a wango-stone before a fourth of one of these _Kalpas_ had
rolled by." In the sacred books of Buddhism, poor, dry, colorless, as they
ordinarily are, imagination in its numerical forms is triumphant. The
_Lalitavistara_ is full of nomenclatures and enumerations of fatiguing
monotony: Buddha is seated on a rock shaded by 100,000 parasols,
surrounded by minor gods forming an assemblage of 68,000 _Kotis_ (i.e.,
680,000,000 persons), and--this surpasses all the rest--"he had
experienced many vicissitudes during 10,100,000,000 _Kalpas_." This makes
one dizzy.

(2) Numerical imagination in the sciences does not take on these
delirious forms; it has the adv