else is there for us to do, if we go on playing, but to throw the old ones over again? The recurrence of the old ones is of strict necessity—it is chance and necessity in one. The order of the throws may be different, is likely to be different—but the repetitions themselves are unavoidable. Nor if there were numbers running into the thousands, or millions, or tens of millions, would it make any difference; if we played long enough, all possible combinations would in time be exhausted, and then, if we continued to play, the old combinations would be repeated. Moreover, if we or others had been playing before, there would have been, however great the number of combinations, the same exhaustion of them in course of time, and thereafter a repetition of previous ones. Repetition, repetition without end, is the law in conditions like these. Grant the suppositions, finite numbers, infinite time, and pure chance (i.e., no interference from an arbitrary will outside, whether in forming the dice to start with or in influencing our muscles in throwing), and the result is inevitable.
The illustration is ridiculously simple—but I think it covers the nerve of Nietzsche's argument. Assuming his preliminary data, the same initial combination of the forces of existence would recur again and again, and each time there would ensue from that combination according to ordinary laws of cause and effect the same identical cosmic evolution, with exactly the same result at any given instant of the process. Indeed, Nietzsche argues that only in this way is there such a thing as strict identity. In our existing world, no two things can be exactly alike, if only because they are differently located in space and outside forces impinge differently upon them, and no one thing can be identical with itself at different times for similar reasons. Whenever then in the distant ranges of the future, after our present world has relapsed into the simple and relatively chaotic state from which it once emerged, the fortuitous course of things shall again bring about a combination of forces like that of which our world is the result, a world precisely similar to ours will again develope and the whole secular process of evolution be repeated: at a certain point everything will be like what it is now, the stars, the sea, the land, the peoples, the philosophies, the arguments, you and I, down to the last detail
