The quote is not easy to be grasped

Baconfield believed he had come to understand that there was a divine order behind the apparent randomness of the world and that he understood the way in which that order was constructed.

(He sounds rather mad, by the way)....so he comes to see thumbprints on his wall as having meaning, and turns that meaning which he perceives into an exciting philosophy of everything....a universal philosophy that he believes explains everything... then is overtaken by chaos.




Sounds like a description of a manic episode.


That's an awfully loose translation, by the way....I'm just trying to give a sense of the meaning for you.

Thank you.

Omniscience = God?

No. Omniscience is to know all things.

I think the context of the sentence would really help anyone understand it better!

Baconfield was on the verge of understanding randomness when chaos swept into his life.

Randomness and chaos are really the same thing so Baconfield wasn't on the verge of understanding anything -- he only thought he was.

I would take the sentence to mean that Baconfield was a man who had steadily built himself a certain kind of life, that he thought he had everything figured out and that made him feel very powerful. That he had laid down a certain kind of order to his life and that made him feel that he understood life.

Then something happened that set that world spinning and he realized that what he thought he had been building wasn't what he ended up with.

It was just a way of saying in purple prose that one moment he thought he understood, and in the next, he was confused...

Cool!

Thank you.