It is manifest that there is an intimate relation between the religious need of an eternal life after death and the conclusions—­always provisional—­at which scientific philosophy arrives with respect to the probable future of the material or sensible Universe.  And the fact is that just as there are theologians of God and the immortality of the soul, so there are also those whom Brunhes calls (op. cit., chap. xxvi., Sec. 2) theologians of monism, and whom it would perhaps be better to call atheologians, people who pertinaciously adhere to the spirit of a priori affirmation; and this becomes intolerable, Brunhes adds, when they harbour the pretension of despising theology.  A notable type of these gentlemen may be found in Haeckel, who has succeeded in solving the riddles of Nature!

These atheologians have seized upon the principle of the conservation of energy, the “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed” formula, the theological origin of which is seen in Descartes, and have made use of it as a means whereby we are able to dispense with God.  “The world built to last,” Brunhes comments, “resisting all wear and tear, or rather automatically repairing the rents that appear in it—­what a splendid theme for oratorical amplification!  But these same amplifications which served in the seventeenth century to prove the wisdom of the Creator have been used in our days as arguments for those who presume to do without Him.”  It is the old story:  so-called scientific philosophy, the origin and inspiration of which is fundamentally theological or religious, ending in an atheology or irreligion, which is itself nothing else but theology and religion.  Let us call to mind the comments of Ritschl upon this head, already quoted in this work.

To-day the last word of science, or rather of scientific philosophy, appears to be that, by virtue of the degradation of energy, of the predominance of irreversible phenomena, the material, sensible world is travelling towards a condition of ultimate levelness, a kind of final homogeneity.  And this brings to our mind the hypothesis, not only so much used but abused by Spencer, of a primordial homogeneity, and his fantastic theory of the instability of the homogeneous.  An instability that required the atheological agnosticism of Spencer in order to explain the inexplicable transition from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.  For how, without any action from without, can any heterogeneity emerge from perfect and absolute homogeneity?  But as it was necessary to get rid of every kind of creation, “the unemployed engineer turned metaphysician,” as Papini called him, invented the theory of the instability of the homogeneous, which is more ... what shall I say? more mystical, and even more mythological if you like, than the creative action of God.

The Italian positivist, Roberto Ardigo, was nearer the mark when, objecting to Spencer’s theory, he said that the most natural supposition was that things always were as they are now, that always there have been worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage, worlds completely formed and worlds in process of dissolution; that heterogeneity, in short, is eternal.  Another way, it will be seen, of not solving the riddle.