The Mystery of Words
I
Beginnings and Ends
Beginnings and ends are provisional conceptions. They enable us to study the changes of growth and decay between the two hypothetical extremes. We follow an endless chain of events in one direction. Having gone as far as we can go, we think of the just-beyond as a beginning. We follow as far as we can in an opposite direction, and that we call the end. But the terms beginning and end properly apply only to phases. Thus we may think of events as an endless chain having neither beginning nor end, since the beginning of one phase (or festoon of phases) links up with the end of another.
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