“The beginning and end of all things is the lack of moderation”

“The beginning and end of all things is the lack of moderation” is Professor Baryton’s compressed explanation of an approaching catastrophe. In his account, the loss of proportion sets off a chain reaction: unchecked exaggeration destroys moderation, moderation’s disappearance brings down power, and human beings rush toward a collective collapse.

The Maxim and Its Causal Logic

Baryton presents the statement as something Ferdinand should remember, then immediately turns it into a historical argument. The catastrophe began, he says, when people “played fast and loose with their sense of proportion” and gave themselves over to “foreign exaggerations.” His formulation makes excess more than an individual failing: it is the originating condition of a broad social and mental disorder.

The related claim that “When moderation’s gone, power goes with it” gives the maxim its consequence. Power depends on restraint and proportion; once those limits fail, society does not recover a stable balance but loses its capacity to govern itself. Baryton imagines the result not as a measured decline but as a stampede, a mass movement toward ruin.

Baryton’s Vision of Collapse

The maxim belongs to a larger warning addressed to Ferdinand. Baryton predicts that the human mind will lose its balance and dissolve amid “apocalyptic ambitions.” He dates the acceleration to about 1900, after which, in his telling, the world—and psychiatry in particular—became caught in a frantic competition to be more perverse, salacious, outlandish, and revolting than its neighbors.

His account links this cultural escalation to madness. Baryton describes people as consumed by a “beast without heart and without restraint,” whose wars and destructive force are already closing in from every side. The catastrophe is therefore both inward and outward: minds become disordered while the surrounding world appears to descend into violence and ruin.

Meaning and Dramatic Function

The maxim’s force lies in its circular reach: lack of moderation is at once the beginning of the disaster and the condition that brings everything to an end. It turns a warning about excess into a bleak theory of history, in which unchecked ambition does not produce lasting power but strips away the restraints that make power possible.

Baryton’s certainty also gives the expression its dramatic edge. He presents collapse as already under way, not as a distant possibility, and tells Ferdinand that the younger generation will witness its end. The aphorism thus condenses his broader vision into a memorable causal rule: once proportion is abandoned, disorder becomes self-propelling.