Inconceivable

Then a strange fit of brooding came over him. Escaping from the influences of personality, his imagination wrought back through eras of geologic time, held him in a vision of the infinitely remote, shrivelled into insignificance all but the one fact of inconceivable duration.

George Gissing - Born in Exile (1892)


It’s part of the fascination of trying to cope with even a casual grasp of geological periods where a million years is the smallest unit of time and even this is both inconceivably long and too short to be useful. The perspective problem is not dissimilar to the inconceivable distances we have to cope with in the universe, or within our own galaxy or even our own solar system.

We could take it further. The propagation of light is inconceivably fast, atoms are inconceivably small, gravity is inconceivably weird and human activity and even our technology are becoming inconceivably complex.

Sometimes it is worth dwelling on these things, the pitfalls of trying to approximate the inconceivable within language, within generalisations, hypotheses and theories.

Yet as we know, with care and much trial and error, we often manage to approximate the inconceivable within language. It could be said that this is one of our greatest achievement. Degrading the achievement is the great moral crime of charlatans - and one of their tools.