arts of this
universe as now--one system decaying as another is coming into being; is
it not more reasonable to imagine (for it is only a question of
imagining) that the primordial datum was not uniform nebula, but matter
in all stages of elaboration from the highest to the lowest--the same
sort of result as we should get from a cross-section at any subsequent
moment in the process? What reason is there for assuming primordial
homogeneity, since every backward step would show us, together with the
unravelling of what is now in process of weaving, a counter-balancing
weaving of what is now in process of disintegration? Were this earth
all, we might dream of universal advance by shutting our eyes to a great
many incompatible facts; but when our telescopes show us the
co-existence of integration and disintegration everywhere, what can we
conclude but that in the past as in the future, no alteration is to be
looked for beyond the shifting of the waves' crest from side to side of
the sea of matter--the total ratio of depressions to elevations
remaining exactly constant.

Were the other view of an original universal homogeneity correct, how
conies it that we have still co-existent every stage of advance from the
lowest to the highest, and that there is not a greater equality?--a
difficulty which does not exist if we suppose things to have been _on
the whole,_ as they are now, from the very first. But whichever view we
take; whether we suppose all things collectively to oscillate between
recurring extremes of "sameness" and "otherness;" or every stage of the
wave of progress from crest to trough, to be simultaneously manifested
in the universe at all times, the old difficulty of "the beginning" will
force itself upon us. A process _ab aeterno_ is at least as unimaginable
as the process of creation _ex nihilo;_ if it be not altogether
inconceivable to boot. And the alternative is, either a primordial state
of homogeneous matter which contains the present cosmos in germ, and
from which it is evolved without the aid of any environment--such a germ
claiming a designer as much as any ready-made perfect world; or else, a
primordial state of things like that which we should get at any
cross-section of the secular process, in which every stage of life and
death, growth and decay, evolution and involution, is represented as
now. This would include fossils and remains of past civilizations
which (in the hypothesis) would never have exis