"A hideous cold freezes me, even to the depths of my soul! This is beyond the extreme of pain! It is like a death that is deeper than death! I roll in the immensity of darkness; and the darkness itself enters within me. My consciousness bursts beneath this dilation of nothingness!"
THE DEVIL. "Yet the knowledge of things comes to thee only through the medium of thy mind. Even as a concave mirror, it deforms the objects it reflects; and thou hast no means whatever of verifying their exactitude."
"Never canst thou know the universe in all its vastness; consequently it will never be possible for thee to obtain an idea of its cause, to have a just notion of God, nor even to say that the universe is infinite,--for thou must first be able to know what the Infinite is!"
"May not Form be, perhaps, an error of thy senses,--Substance a figment of thy imagination?"
"Unless, indeed, that the world being a perpetual flux[1] of things, appearance, on the contrary, be wholly true; illusion the only reality."
"But art thou sure thou dost see?--art thou even sure thou dost live? Perhaps nothing exists!"
(_The Devil has seized Anthony, and, holding him at arms' length, glares at him with mouth yawning as though to devour him_):
"Adore me, then!--and curse the phantom thou callest God!"
(_Anthony lifts his eyes with a last effort of hope._
[1] The original text seems to me slightly obscure. The idea of the universe being a perpetual ebb and flow of shapes, is that of forms passing away to reappear like waves, is that of the Nidana-Sutris: "Individuality is only a form ... _Everything is only a flux of aggregates_, interminably uniting and disuniting," as Barth observes in his "Religions of India."--Trans.
ANTHONY (_finds himself lying upon his back, at the verge of the cliff._
"Is it the glow of dawn, or only an effect of moonlight?"
(_He tries to rise, falls back,--his teeth chattering_):
"I feel such a helplessness of weakness, as though all my bones were broken!
"Ah! the Devil!--I remember!--he even repeated to me all that I learned from the aged Didymus respecting the opinions of Xenophanes, Heraclitus, of Melissus, of Anaxagoras,--concerning the infinite, the creation, the impossibility of knowing anything!