at the future of material
development is free of the objection. For the eternity of
unprogressive events involved in the future on Kant's hypothesis,
is not only thinkable, but any change is, as observed,
irreconcilable with our ideas of energy. As in the future so in
the past we look to a cessation to progress. But as we believe
the activity of the present universe must in some form have
existed all along, the only refuge in the past is to imagine an
active but unprogressive eternity, the unprogressive activity at
some period becoming a progressive activity--that progressive
activity of which we are spectators. To the unprogressive
activity there was no beginning; in fact, beginning is as
unthinkable and uncalled for to the unprogressive activity of the
past as ending is to the unprogressive activity of the future,
when all developmental actions shall have ceased. There is no
beginning or ending to the activity of the universe.

291

There is beginning and ending to present progressive activity.
Looking through the realm of nature we seek beginning and ending,
but "passing through nature to eternity" we find neither. Both
are justified; the questioning of the ancient poet regarding the
past, and of the modern regarding the future, quoted at the head
of this essay.

The next objection, which is in part metaphysical, is founded on
the difficulty of ascribing any ultimate reality or potency to
forces diminishing through eternal time. Thus, against the
assumption that our universe is the result of material
aggregation progressing over eternal time, which involves the
primitive infinite separation of the particles, we may ask, what
force can have acted between particles sundered by infinite
distance? The gravitational force falling off as the square of
the distance, must vanish at infinity if we mean what we say when
we ascribe infinite separation to them. Their condition is then
one of neutral stability, a finite movement of the particles
neither increasing nor diminishing interaction. They had then
remained eternally in their separated condition, there being no
cause to render such condition finite. The difficulty involved
here appears to me of the same nature as the difficulty of
ascribing any residual heat to the sun after eternal time has
elapsed. In both cases we are bound to prolong the time, from our
very idea of time, till progress is no more, when in the one case
we can imagine no mutual approximation of th