Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/274

Rh shore, and wheeling it away to make an embankment, and if you began to admire his industry, seeing how considerable a mass of sand he had wheeled away, and how little remained in the sand-hill on which he was working, you might still check yourself to ask him: "How long, O friend, hast thou been at work?" And if he answered that he had been wheeling away there from all eternity, and was in fact an essential feature of the universe, you would not only inwardly marvel at his mendacity, but you would be moved to say: "So be it, O friend, but thou must then have been from all eternity an infinitely lazy fellow." Might we not venture to suspect the same of our law of universal physical progress?

But let us already hint by anticipation one further thought. Why is not any purely historical view of the world open to the same objection? If the history began by some arbitrary act of will at some time not very long since, then this history, viewed by itself apart from the creative act, may be intelligible enough in its inner unity and significance, although an arbitrary act of will can be no true explanation. But the whole physical world cannot be regarded at once as a complete, self-existent whole, with an eternity of past life, and as, in its deepest truth, an historical process of any sort. For it is of the essence of an intelligible historical process to have, like a tragedy in Aristotle's famous account of tragedy, a beginning, a middle, and an end. An infinite series of successive acts cannot be one organic historical process. Either this everlasting series of facts has no significance at all, or else it must have