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Man has found out the great paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits; it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness; finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but completeness manifested in parts, infinity revealed within bounds.
This loss of form may not be unwelcome, if it is the formless that, by anticipation, speaks through what is surrendering its being. Though to acquire or impart form is delightful in art, in thought, in generation, in government, yet a euthanasia of finitude is also known.
Though aware of their finitude, most people behave as though they are going to live forever. Economic and social institutions are formed to last. People embark on long term projects and make enduring decisions for instance, to invest money in stocks or bonds even when they are very old. Childless octogenarian inventors defend their fair share of royalties with youthful ferocity and tenacity.
One of our deans is inclined to assert the finitude of God, and another to deny anything in the nature of personality to God or to man's spirit! Rather confusing! Philosophic questions of this kind, however, do not greatly concern mankind. To believe in God the Father is essential to the Christian religion. Other doctrines may not be so essential, but they must not be regarded as unimportant.
If God were absolutely free there would be no creation. The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one. Similarly, when we talk about the relative values of freedom and non-freedom, it becomes a mere play of words. It is not that we desire freedom alone, we want thraldom as well.
We would be forever heaping together possessions, dragging things into the cave of our finitude, our individual self, not perceiving that the things which pass that dreariest of doors, whatever they may have been, are thenceforth but 'straws, small sticks, and dust of the floor. When a man would have a truth in thither as if it were of private interpretation, he drags in only the bag which the truth, remaining outside, has burst and left.
Under these circumstances, inhabitants even of the lowest heaven would be unreservedly happy, as happy in their way as those of the seventh heaven could be in theirs. No pathetic note would any longer disquiet their finitude. They would not have to renounce, in sad conformity to an alien will, what even for them would have been a deeper joy.
When we say a vessel is empty, we mean that the bodies which fill it are imperceptible; if it were absolutely empty its sides would touch. Descartes argues against the atomic theory and against the finitude of the world, as he argues against empty space: matter, as well as space, has no smallest, indivisible parts, and the extension of the world has no end.
Two answers are given. The first is found only between the lines: the imperfections in the being and action of individual things are grounded in their finitude, particularly in their involution in the chain of causality, in virtue of which they are acted on from without, and are determined in their action not by their own nature only, but also by external causes.
"It is gone," said I; "and I am gone also to finish my bottle of Burgundy, which I have as little doubt was commissioned from finitude to strike a little fire into the heart of another erring mortal, not at this moment perfectly happy." And I made my way as quick as possible into the parlour, glad to get quit of the chill of the night air.
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