Galaxy And All

Maybe when the characters in the two Nerthusian short stories referred to "the Galaxy," they used this term very loosely to mean a volume of galactic space that was a mere thousand light-years in diameter? We sometimes use the word, "life," to mean human experience, not all organic life, and the phrase, "the world," can mean society rather than the globe. Maybe when Joe referred to the great worlds of the Galaxy, he meant planets dominated by intelligent species older than humanity? (We know that Joe was lying about travelling through space but he still had to be referring to real places that he claimed to have visited.)

In Virgin Planet, Bertram Davis refers sarcastically to Coordinator Yamagata Tetsuo as "'...the Cosmic All...,'" (CHAPTER II, p. 15) which tells us that this phrase is used in "...the philosophical pantheism of Cosmos..." (AUTHOR'S NOTE, p. 151) In Anderson's Technic History, Olaf Magnusson contemplates the All.

I think that the All is a valid concept. The relative is that which exists by virtue of its relationships to something/everything else. The Absolute, the opposite of the relative, is independent of external relationships and therefore can only be everything, the totality of all the relationships. The Absolute is internally differentiated and appears to itself as many finite subjects and objects distributed through space and time. We can contemplate It but not pray to It. It has been personified as a single personal being whereas in reality it incorporates all such beings.