Epictetus: "Some say that when Zeus is
left alone at the time of the conflagration, he is solitary, and
bewails himself

1 Wilson, Lectures on the Hindus, pp. 53-56.

2 The Dabistan, vol. iii. p. 169.

that he has no company."3 The Stoics supposed each succeeding
formation to be perfectly like the preceding. Every particular
that happens now has happened exactly so a thousand times before,
and will happen a thousand times again. This view they connected
with astronomical calculations, making the burning and re creating
of the world coincide with the same position of the stars as that
at which it previously occurred.4 This they called the restoration
of all things. The idea of these enormous revolving identical
epochs Day of Brahm, Cycle of the Stoics, or Great Year of Plato
is a physical fatalism, effecting a universal resurrection of the
past, by reproducing it over and over forever.

Humboldt seems more than inclined to adopt the same thought. "In
submitting," he says, "physical phenomena and historical events to
the exercise of the reflective faculty, and in ascending to their
causes by reasoning, we become more and more penetrated by that
ancient belief, that the forces inherent in matter, and those
regulating the moral world, exert their action under the presence
of a primordial necessity and according to movements periodically
renewed." The wise man of old said, "The thing that hath been, it
is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall
be done, and there is no new thing under the sun." The conception
of the destinies of the universe as a circle returning forever
into itself is an artifice on which the thinking mind early
seizes, to evade the problem that is too mighty for its feeble
powers. It concludes that the final aim of Nature is but the
infinite perfecting of her material in infinite transformations
ever repeating the same old series. We cannot comprehend and
master satisfactorily the eternal duration of one visible order,
the incessant rolling on of races and stars:

"And doth creation's tide forever flow, Nor ebb with like
destruction? World on world Are they forever heaping up, and still
The mighty measure never, never full?"

And so, when the contemplation of the staggering infinity
threatens to crush the brain, we turn away and find relief in the
view of a periodical revolution, wherein all comes to an end from
time to time and takes a fresh start. It would be wiser for