could be—that the world is eternally in process of change. The mechanical view, as sometimes expounded, leads one to anticipate a final state in which heat and all forms of energy are evenly dispersed through space, so that transformations become thereafter impossible (save by a miracle of some kind); but Nietzsche goes so far as to say that if the mechanical theory cannot escape the consequences of a final stationary state, such as Sir William Thomson describes, the theory is ipso facto disproved. If any such state were really possible, it would have been attained in the limitless stretches of past time, and we (if there were any sense in speaking of "we" in such a connection, being ourselves changeable beings) should be in it.[1] b
Fifthly, so far as the special cosmic order now existing is concerned, Nietzsche thinks, agreeably to current views, that it had a beginning sometime in the past. There was some relatively simple state of forces, from which the present more or less organized world has gradually evolved. Moreover, all the processes of this evolution, even the minutest details of it, hang together—so much so, that if any least thing were different from what it is, all other things would have to be different too, and if we approve any one thing we have to approve everything else, each being bound up with the others, whether as condition or consequence. And as this cosmic order began, so it will in the course of time end, the forces relapsing into some such unorganized state as they had at the start.[2] This view of a relative beginning and end of things is a common one, and it is at least not uncommon to think that after one ending there will in time be another beginning—so that, if we go far enough along this line, we gain the idea of a succession of worlds or cosmic orders.
So far as there is any novelty in Nietzsche's speculation, it is from this point on. It by no means follows, he thinks, that because these worlds follow one another they will be like one another, save under certain extremely general aspects. They may differ widely. Mechanical laws as we know them may not be strictly necessary, and so it may be with chemical affinity
