Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/275

250 had essentially the same significance all the way along. So, if the world is infinite in time, it cannot as a whole have, strictly speaking, any history. The longest continued story in the most thrilling of the cheap weeklies reaches, as we are given to understand, a conclusion at some time. Imagine an infinite continued story, with the poor lovers eternally weeping and quarreling, and you will see what an infinite historical process in the world would mean. It would of course be an eternal repetition of the same thing, no story at all. If the world, regarded in time, cannot as a whole have any genuine history at all, it is then hopeless to look in the world’s history, as distinct from the world’s nature, for anything of fundamental religious significance.

And so we are thrown back to our starting-point. This splendid conception of science, this world of unalterable mechanical law, in which all things that happen are predetermined from all eternity, this mathematical machine, has a real history no more than the ebbing and flowing sea-tides would have from day to day any history, apart from the fact that they once did not so ebb and flow at all. Eternally repeated rhythms, or ceaseless new combinations of elements, clash of atoms, quiver of ether waves, mechanical changes forever; but no eternal progress, no historical sense to the whole, — that seems the conception of the physical world as a whole to which we are driven. It is a strictly mathematical, a physically intelligible, conception, but what religious significance has it? Yet such is the conception that we must have of any eternal physical process.