Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

5. Eternity

‘The mind is eternal in so far as it understands under the aspect of eternity.’

Spinoza — Ethics

‘Nature is an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.’

Blaise Pascal — Pensées

The ‘fallacy of the ephemeral’ suggests that ‘transitional beings’ (that’s us!) think that things are eternal and indestructible merely because they outlive us! So that notion needs to be kept in mind when dealing with the topic of eternity.

The ancients sometimes believed that if an object was a ‘simple’ object — that is, made of just one kind of stuff — then it was also unchanging. By ‘unchanging’ they often also meant a particular kind of endurance. Such simple, unchanging things would not just endure through ‘clock time’, so to speak. They would rather possess a kind of timelessness and eternity. If, for instance, the universe is considered to be The One, then it exists in this timeless eternity. The notion is still with us — both for the universe at large and also the

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