Is this perhaps the solution?  But in that case the Universe would be infinite, and in reality we are unable to conceive a Universe that is both eternal and limited such as that which served as the basis of Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence.  If the Universe must be eternal, if within it and as regards each of its component worlds, periods in which the movement is towards homogeneity, towards the degradation of energy, must alternate with other periods in which the movement is towards heterogeneity, then it is necessary that the Universe should be infinite, that there should be scope, always and in each world, for some action coming from without.  And, in fact, the body of God cannot be other than eternal and infinite.

But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual levelling-down—­or, we might say, its death—­appears to be proved.  And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit?  Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it rather grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature?—­for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit.  May it be that consciousness and its extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at the expense of the other?

The fact is that the best of our scientific work, the best of our industry (that part of it I mean—­and it is a large part—­that does not tend to destruction), is directed towards retarding this fatal process of the degradation of energy.  And organic life, the support of our consciousness, is itself an effort to avoid, so far as it is possible, this fatal period, to postpone it.

It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan paeans in praise of Nature, for as Leopardi, that Christian atheist, said with profound truth in his stupendous poem La Ginestra, Nature “gives us life like a mother, but loves us like a step-mother.”  The origin of human companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature that first linked men together in the bonds of society.  It is human society, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of grace upon the state of Nature; and it is man who, by humanizing and spiritualizing Nature by his industry, supernaturalizes her.

In two amazing sonnets which he called Redemption, the tragic Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but—­as is natural in a poet—­in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision.  It is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by consciousness.