“Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omne
Praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai
Multimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis,
Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta
Haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse:
Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente:
Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vageque
Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”
Lines which Mr. Cyril Bailey in his translation of Lucretius[6] admirably renders as follows: “For when you look back over all the lapse of immeasurable time that now is gone, and think how manifold are the motions of matter, you could easily believe this too, that these same seeds, whereof we now are made, have often been placed in the same order as they are now; and yet we cannot recall that in our life’s memory; for in between lies a break in life, and all the motions have wandered everywhere far astray from sense.”
The character of Nietzsche’s thinking appears in his application of this idea. It is for him “the great disciplinary thought,” and he leaps the gulf between determinism and free will in the most careless manner, to remark: “The question which thou shalt have to answer before every deed that thou doest—Is this such a deed as I am prepared to perform an infinite number of times?—is the best ballast.” It does not matter to him at all that a determinist idea is to be used as a standard of choice by a being whose free will he assumes. His thoughts are all thoughts for himself to live with. He is conscious of them not as abstractions, but particularly, as concrete things, combinations of ideas with their effects. He is able to speak of Eternal Recurrence as “the most oppressive thought,” and to consider “the means of enduring it.” I cannot imagine Kant or Berkeley speaking so of their ideas.