the following conclusions respecting the
unfolding of the universe in time and its limitation in space, we must
again turn our attention to certain portions of the "scheme of the
universe."

Eternity is ascribed to existence, in agreement with Hegel, what Hegel
calls "tiresome (schlecht) eternity," and this eternity is now
investigated. "The plainest form of an incontrovertible idea of
eternity is the piling up of numbers unlimitedly in arithmetical
progression. Just as we can give a complete unity to each number
without the possibility of repetition, so at every stage of its being
it progresses still further and eternity consists in the unlimited
manifestation of this condition. This sufficiently conceived eternity
has but one single beginning with one single direction. Although it is
not material to our concept to imagine a direction opposite to that in
which the progression piles up, this notion of a backward moving
eternity is only a hasty picture drawn by the imagination. Since it
must necessarily run in a contrary direction, it would have behind it
in each instance an endless succession of numbers. But this would be
inadmissible as constituting the contradiction of a calculated
infinity of numbers, and so it seems absurd to imagine a second
direction of eternity."

The first conclusion to be drawn from this conception of eternity is
that the chain of cause and effect in the universe must once have had
a beginning: an endless number of causes which have followed one
another endlessly is therefore unthinkable, "because innumerability is
thus considered as enumerated," therefore a final cause is proved.

The second conclusion is "the law of the definite number: the
accumulation of identical independent objects of an actual species is
only thinkable as being made up of a definite number of these
individual objects." Not only must the actual number of the heavenly
bodies be definite at a given time, but the total number of all
existent objects, the smallest independent particles of matter. This
last necessity constitutes the real reason why no composite body is
thinkable except as made up of atoms. All actual division has a fixed
limit and must have it, if the contradiction of a numerated
innumerability is to be avoided. On the same grounds not only must the
revolutions of the sun and earth be fixed as they have occurred up to
the present, even if they cannot be indicated, but all the periodical
processes of natur