• Nulliverse

    Origin

    From null and universe, coined by William James.

    Full definition of nulliverse

    Noun

    nulliverse

    (plural nulliverses)
    1. (philosophy) The world, regarded as having no rationality or rules.
      • 1882, On Some Hegelisms, If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose haphazard sway I will not truckle.
      • 1909, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures to Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy, If rationality be in it at all, it must be in it throughout ; if irrationality be in it anywhere, that also must pervade it throughout. It must be wholly rational or wholly irrational, pure universe or pure multiverse or pure nulliverse ; and reduced to this violent alternative, no one's choice ought long to remain doubtful.
      • 1969, w, You admit yourself that I am only a pale wild girl with gipsy hair in a deathless ballad, in a nulliverse, in Rattner's ‘menald world’ where the only principle is random variation.
      • 1969, August 02, Books: Van Loves Ada, Ada Loves Van, Now, why should an author not create a “nulliverse” to represent “oneirologically” the contents of his own mind?
      • 2004, Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine (tr.), Three Trapped Tigers, ... one of the infinite seas that swim in a bubble of a phenomenal ocean where there are no longer any stars because the stars have lost their name: the nulliverse, and wondering if Bustrófedon's sentity was expanding multiversally, ...
      • 2012, w, w:The Rapture of the Nerds, And Huw is abruptly ejected from whatever pocket nulliverse the Prophet’s fifth column have installed in the lobby of the virtual Tripoli Mariott, to a destination even more profoundly alienating than the cloud itself.

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