Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from theabysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silentdarkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrorsthat imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, exceptuncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze oftheories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but afog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all itswonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, thatseeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the mosthonest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that hemust even doubt his very existence.