union of all mysteries--the mystery of the Cosmos and the mystery
of Fate--oppresses human reason.

The pressure of darkness acts in inverse proportion upon different kinds
of natures. In the presence of night man feels his own incompleteness.
He perceives the dark void and is sensible of infirmity. It is like the
vacancy of blindness. Face to face with night, man bends, kneels,
prostrates himself, crouches on the earth, crawls towards a cave, or
seeks for wings. Almost always he shrinks from that vague presence of
the Infinite Unknown. He asks himself what it is; he trembles and bows
the head. Sometimes he desires to go to it.

To go whither?

He can only answer, "Yonder."

But what is that? and what is there?

This curiosity is evidently forbidden to the spirit of man; for all
around him the roads which bridge that gulf are broken up or gone. No
arch exists for him to span the Infinite. But there is attraction in
forbidden knowledge, as in the edge of the abyss. Where the footstep
cannot tread, the eye may reach; where the eye can penetrate no further,
the mind may soar. There is no man, however feeble or insufficient his
resources, who does not essay. According to his nature he questions or
recoils before that mystery. With some it has the effect of repressing;
with others it enlarges the soul. The spectacle is sombre, indefinite.

Is the night calm and cloudless? It is then a depth of shadow. Is it
stormy? It is then a sea of cloud. Its limitless deeps reveal themselves
to us, and yet baffle our gaze: close themselves against research, but
open to conjecture. Its innumerable dots of light only make deeper the
obscurity beyond. Jewels, scintillations, stars; existences revealed in
the unknown universes; dread defiances to man's approach; landmarks of
the infinite creation; boundaries there, where there are no bounds;
sea-marks impossible, and yet real, numbering the fathoms of those
infinite deeps. One microscopic glittering point; then another; then
another; imperceptible, yet enormous. Yonder light is a focus; that
focus is a star; that star is a sun; that sun is a universe; that
universe is nothing. For all numbers are as zero in the presence of the
Infinite.

These worlds, which yet are nothing, exist. Through this fact we feel
the difference which separates the _being nothing_ from the _not to be_.

The inaccessible joined to the inexplicable, such is the universe. From
the contemplation of the universe