1 Wilson, Lectures on the Hindus, pp. 53-56.
2 The Dabistan, vol. iii. p. 169.
that he has no company."3 The Stoics supposed each succeeding formation to be perfectly like the preceding. Every particular that happens now has happened exactly so a thousand times before, and will happen a thousand times again. This view they connected with astronomical calculations, making the burning and re creating of the world coincide with the same position of the stars as that at which it previously occurred.4 This they called the restoration of all things. The idea of these enormous revolving identical epochs Day of Brahm, Cycle of the Stoics, or Great Year of Plato is a physical fatalism, effecting a universal resurrection of the past, by reproducing it over and over forever.
Humboldt seems more than inclined to adopt the same thought. "In submitting," he says, "physical phenomena and historical events to the exercise of the reflective faculty, and in ascending to their causes by reasoning, we become more and more penetrated by that ancient belief, that the forces inherent in matter, and those regulating the moral world, exert their action under the presence of a primordial necessity and according to movements periodically renewed." The wise man of old said, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun." The conception of the destinies of the universe as a circle returning forever into itself is an artifice on which the thinking mind early seizes, to evade the problem that is too mighty for its feeble powers. It concludes that the final aim of Nature is but the infinite perfecting of her material in infinite transformations ever repeating the same old series. We cannot comprehend and master satisfactorily the eternal duration of one visible order, the incessant rolling on of races and stars:
"And doth creation's tide forever flow, Nor ebb with like destruction? World on world Are they forever heaping up, and still The mighty measure never, never full?"
And so, when the contemplation of the staggering infinity threatens to crush the brain, we turn away and find relief in the view of a periodical revolution, wherein all comes to an end from time to time and takes a fresh start. It would be wiser for us simply to resign the problem as too great. For the conception to which we have recourse is evidently a mere conceit of imagination, without scientific basis or philosophical confirmation.
The doctrine of a bodily resurrection, resting on a wholly different ground, again emerges upon our attention in the Zoroastrian faith of Persia. The good Ormuzd created men to be pure and happy and to pass to a heavenly immortality. The evil Ahriman insinuated his corruptions among them, broke their primal destiny, and brought death upon them, dooming their material frames to loathsome dissolution, their unclothed spirits to a painful abode in hell. Meanwhile, the war between the Light God and the Gloom Fiend rages fluctuatingly. But at last the Good One shall prevail, and the Bad One sink in discomfiture, and all evil deeds be neutralized, and the benignant arrangements decreed at first be restored. Then all
3 Epictetus, lib. iii. cap. 13. Sonntag, De Palingenesia Stoicorum.
4 Ritter's Hist. of An. Phil., lib. xi. cap. 4.
souls shall be redeemed from hell and their bodies be rebuilt from their scattered atoms and clothed upon them again.5 This resurrection is not the consequence of any fixed laws or fate, nor is it an arbitrary miracle. It is simply the restoration by Ormuzd of the original intention which Ahriman had temporarily marred and defeated. This is the great bodily resurrection, as it is still understood and looked for by the Parsees.