st be
eternal, if within it and as regards each of its component worlds,
periods in which the movement is towards homogeneity, towards the
degradation of energy, must alternate with other periods in which the
movement is towards heterogeneity, then it is necessary that the
Universe should be infinite, that there should be scope, always and in
each world, for some action coming from without. And, in fact, the body
of God cannot be other than eternal and infinite.

But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual
levelling-down--or, we might say, its death--appears to be proved. And
how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with
the degradation of the energy of our world and return to
unconsciousness, or will it rather grow according as the utilizable
energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to
retard this degradation and to dominate Nature?--for this it is that
constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its
extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at
the expense of the other?

The fact is that the best of our scientific work, the best of our
industry (that part of it I mean--and it is a large part--that does not
tend to destruction), is directed towards retarding this fatal process
of the degradation of energy. And organic life, the support of our
consciousness, is itself an effort to avoid, so far as it is possible,
this fatal period, to postpone it.

It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan paeans in praise
of Nature, for as Leopardi, that Christian atheist, said with profound
truth in his stupendous poem _La Ginestra_, Nature "gives us life like a
mother, but loves us like a step-mother." The origin of human
companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature
that first linked men together in the bonds of society. It is human
society, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the
craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of grace upon the
state of Nature; and it is man who, by humanizing and spiritualizing
Nature by his industry, supernaturalizes her.

In two amazing sonnets which he called _Redemption_, the tragic
Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit
imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but--as is natural in a
poet--in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the
wind, in all material individualitie