but regulated, like the folding of the earth crust accompanied by destructive earthquakes.  Humanity is tightening.  And war is its seismos.  Yesterday, in all countries, provinces were at war with each other.  Before that, in each province, cities fought together.  Now that national unity has been reached, a larger unity develops.  It is certainly regrettable that it should take place by violence, but that is the natural method.  Of the explosive mixture of conflicting elements in conflict, a new chemical body will be born.  Will it be in the East, or in Europe?  I cannot tell; but surely what results will have new properties, more valuable than its parts.  The end is not yet.  The war of which we are now witnesses is magnificent ... (I beg your pardon; I mean magnificent to the mind, where suffering does not exist) ...  Greater, finer conflicts still are preparing.  These poor childish peoples who imagine that they can disturb the peace of eternity with their cannon shots!...  The whole universe must first pass through the retort.  We shall have a war between the two Americas, one between the New World and the Yellow Continent, then the conquerors and the rest of the world....  That is enough to fill up a few centuries.  And I may not have seen all, my eyes are not very good.  Naturally each of these shocks will lead to social struggles.

“It will all be accomplished in about a dozen centuries. (I am rather inclined to think that it will be more rapid than it seems by comparison with the past, for the movement becomes accelerated as it proceeds.) No doubt we shall arrive at a rather impoverished synthesis, for many constituent elements, some good, some bad, will be destroyed in the process, the one being too delicate to resist the hostile environment, the other injurious and impossible to assimilate.  Then we shall have the celebrated United States of the whole world; and this union will be all the more solid, because, as is probable, man will be menaced by a common danger.  The canals of Mars, the drying-up or cooling-off of the planet, some mysterious plague, the pendulum of Poe, in short, the vision of an inevitable death overwhelming the human race....  There will be great things to behold!  The Genius of the race, stretched to the uttermost, in its last agonies.

“There will be, on the other hand, very little liberty; human multiplicity when near its end will fuse itself into a Unity of Will.  Do we not see the beginnings already?  Thus, without abrupt mutations, will be effected the reintegration of the complex in the one, of old Empedocles’ Hatred in Love.”

“And what then?”

“After that?  A rest, and then it will all begin over again, there can be no doubt.  A young cycle.  The new Kalpa.  The world will turn once more, on the re-forged wheel.”

“And what is the answer to the riddle?”

“The Hindoos would tell you Siva.  Siva, who creates and destroys; destroys and creates.”