with God. "The world built to last," Brunhes comments,
"resisting all wear and tear, or rather automatically repairing the
rents that appear in it--what a splendid theme for oratorical
amplification! But these same amplifications which served in the
seventeenth century to prove the wisdom of the Creator have been used in
our days as arguments for those who presume to do without Him." It is
the old story: so-called scientific philosophy, the origin and
inspiration of which is fundamentally theological or religious, ending
in an atheology or irreligion, which is itself nothing else but theology
and religion. Let us call to mind the comments of Ritschl upon this
head, already quoted in this work.

To-day the last word of science, or rather of scientific philosophy,
appears to be that, by virtue of the degradation of energy, of the
predominance of irreversible phenomena, the material, sensible world is
travelling towards a condition of ultimate levelness, a kind of final
homogeneity. And this brings to our mind the hypothesis, not only so
much used but abused by Spencer, of a primordial homogeneity, and his
fantastic theory of the instability of the homogeneous. An instability
that required the atheological agnosticism of Spencer in order to
explain the inexplicable transition from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous. For how, without any action from without, can any
heterogeneity emerge from perfect and absolute homogeneity? But as it
was necessary to get rid of every kind of creation, "the unemployed
engineer turned metaphysician," as Papini called him, invented the
theory of the instability of the homogeneous, which is more ... what
shall I say? more mystical, and even more mythological if you like, than
the creative action of God.

The Italian positivist, Roberto Ardigo, was nearer the mark when,
objecting to Spencer's theory, he said that the most natural supposition
was that things always were as they are now, that always there have been
worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage, worlds
completely formed and worlds in process of dissolution; that
heterogeneity, in short, is eternal. Another way, it will be seen, of
not solving the riddle.

Is this perhaps the solution? But in that case the Universe would be
infinite, and in reality we are unable to conceive a Universe that is
both eternal and limited such as that which served as the basis of
Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence. If the Universe mu