In La Degradation de l’energie (iv^e partie, chap. xviii., 2) B. Brunhes relates a story concerning the great Catholic mathematician Cauchy, communicated to him by M. Sarrau, who had it from Pere Gratry.  While Cauchy and Pere Gratry were walking in the gardens of the Luxumbourg, their conversation turned upon the happiness which those in heaven would have in knowing at last, without any obscurity or limitation, the truths which they had so long and so laboriously sought to investigate on earth.  In allusion to the study which Cauchy had made of the mechanistic theory of the reflection of light, Pere Gratry threw out the suggestion that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate into the secret of light.  To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him to be possible to know more about this than he himself already knew, neither could he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could arrive at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of reflection than that manifested in his own explanation of it, seeing that he had furnished a mechanistic theory of the phenomenon.  “His piety,” Brunhes adds, “did not extend to a belief that God Himself could have created anything different or anything better.”

From this narrative two points of interest emerge.  The first is the idea expressed in it as to what contemplation, intellectual love, or beatific vision, may mean for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose ruling passion is knowledge; and the second is the implicit faith shown in the mechanistic explanation of the world.

This mechanistic tendency of the intellect coheres with the well-known formula, “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”—­a formula by means of which it has been sought to interpret the ambiguous principle of the conservation of energy, forgetting that practically, for us, for men, energy is utilizable energy, and that this is continually being lost, dissipated by the diffusion of heat, and degraded, its tendency being to arrive at a dead-level and homogeneity.  That which has value, and more than value, reality, for us, is the differential, which is the qualitative; pure, undifferentiated quantity is for us as if it did not exist, for it does not act.  And the material Universe, the body of the Universe, would appear to be gradually proceeding—­unaffected by the retarding action of living organisms or even by the conscious action of man—­towards a state of perfect stability, of homogeneity (vide Brunhes, op. cit.) For, while spirit tends towards concentration, material energy tends towards diffusion.

And may not this have an intimate relation with our problem?  May there not be a connection between this conclusion of scientific philosophy with respect to a final state of stability and homogeneity and the mystical dream of the apocatastasis?  May not this death of the body of the Universe be the final triumph of its spirit, of God?