Poincaré in an attic at Paris, a center of supersensual chaos. The discovery did not distress him. A solitary man of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic Cathedral or a Paris apartment, need fret himself little about a few illusions more or less. He should have learned his lesson fifty years before. Possibly Galileo, Descartes and Newton, if they believed the religious unity they professed, might have refused to go on with a science which led them into the arms of Helmholz and Hæckel; but the times had long passed when a student could stop before chaos or order; he had no choice but to march with his world.
Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human mind has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the chaos which caged it. Appearing suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void; passing half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep; victim even when awake, to its own ill-adjustment, to disease, to age, to external suggestion, to nature's compulsion; doubting its sensations, and, in the last resort, trusting only to instruments and averages; after sixty or seventy years of growing astonishment, the mind wakes to finds itself looking blankly into the void of death. That it should profess itself pleased by this performance was all that the highest rules of good breeding could ask; but that it should actually be satisfied would prove beyond all possible dispute that it existed only as idiocy.
Satisfied, the future generation could scarcely think itself, for even when the mind existed in a universe of its own creation, it had never been quite at ease. As far as one ventured to interpret actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself by an infinite series of infinitely delicate adjustments forced on it by the infinite motion of an infinite chaos of motion; dragged at one moment into the unknowable and unthinkable, then trying to scramble back within its senses and to bar the chaos out, but always assimilating bits of it, until at last, in 1900, a new avalanche of unknown forces had fallen on it, which required new mental powers to control. If this view was correct, the mind could gain nothing by flight or by fight; it must merge in its supersensual multiverse, or succumb to it.
