They
supposed the universe to be eternal, and attributed the production of
plants, and animals, and man to the blind unconscious working of
lifeless matter. They attributed to dead matter the powers which
believers attributed to a living God. They were obliged to believe that
senseless atoms could produce works transcending the powers of the
mightiest minds on earth. To reconcile their belief in the eternity of
the universe, and in the unchanging properties of matter, with the
phenomena of change and progress, they supposed an infinite succession
of worlds, or of beginnings and endings of the same world, and imagined
the earth running exactly the same course, and having exactly the same
history, every time it came into existence. Hence it became with them an
article of faith, that we had ourselves lived an infinite number of
times, and should live an infinite number of times more in the future,
repeating always exactly the same life, with exactly the same results.
It was also an article of faith that we were mere machines, governed by
powers over which we had no control; that our ideas of liberty, and our
feelings of responsibility, or of good and ill desert, were all
delusions; that all the errors, and crimes, and miseries of our race
were inevitable, and were to be eternally repeated; and that a change
for the better was eternally impossible.
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