Mathematical philosophy, a study of fate and freedom; lectures for educated laymen, by Cassius J. Keyser.

230 MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY
the history of the universe being a continuous and endlessly repeated vaudeville performance of a single play.
Something like the foregoing seems to be implicit in
the following statement by Aristotle in the Metaphysics:
Every art and every kind of philosophy have probably been invented many times up to the limits of what
is possible and been again destroyed.
And in Ecclesiastes (III, I5):
That which hath been is now; and that which is
to be hath already been.
Even Herbert Spencer at the close of his First Principles speaks as follows:
Thus we are led to the conclusion that the entire
process of things, as displayed in the aggregate of the
visible universe, is analogous to the entire process of
things as displayed in the smallest aggregates. Motion
as well as matter being fixed in quantity, it would seem
that the change in the distribution of matter which
motion effects, coming to a limit in whatever direction
it is carried, the indestructible motion necessitates a
reverse redistribution. Apparently the universally
coexistent forces of attraction and repulsion, which
necessitate rhythm in all minor changes throughout the
universe, also necessitates rhythm in the totality of
changes-alternate eras of evolution and dissolution.
And thus there is suggested the conception of a past
during which there have been successive evolutions
analogous to that which is now going on; and a future
during which successive other evolutions may go onever the same in principle but never the same in concrete result.
Spencer was, you know, but poorly informed in the history
of thought and he was probably not aware that the main