If there is no such thing as the infinitesimal, then, as Russell observed, notions like “the next moment” and “state of change” become meaningless. Nature is rendered static and discontinuous, because there is no smooth transitional element to blend one event into the next. In a rather abstract sense, things no longer “hang together.” The resulting sense of ontological discontinuity can be detected in the cultural lurch toward modernism—as witness Seurat’s pointillism, Muybridge’s stop-motion photography, the poetry of Rimbaud and Laforgue, the tone rows of Schoenberg, and the novels of Joyce.
