The theories of continuance all assume that the world will go upon its usual way. Generation will follow generation in this life, but the lower culture does not ask what will happen in the next. It cannot take big time-surveys, like the Egyptian "millions of years" or the Hebrew "ages of ages." The future will be like the present, as the present has been like the past. Imagination can conceive a beginning, it does not at first advance to an end. But the development of astronomy in Babylonia, with the discovery of regular periodicities in Nature, seems to have suggested the idea of a great World-Year, an immense period beginning with creation, which would be brought to an end by some { 241} great catastrophe such as flood or fire. The flood had already taken place. Traditions of it floated to India and Greece; they were incorporated in ancient Hebrew story. After another immense revolution of time would there be a similar close? There is some evidence that this was part of Babylonian teaching in the days of Berosus, in the middle of the third century B.C. (p. 39), but it has not yet been discovered in the ancient cuneiform texts. The next agency of dissolution would be heat. It was part of early Buddhist speculation, and lodged itself in Indian thought; and from the days of Pythagoras, in the sixth century B.C., it formed part of the Greek philosophical outlook in different schools towards the "last things." When the next periodic destruction took place, what would happen? According to one answer the restoration of all things would set in, and the entire cycle would be repeated over again. Eudemus, a pupil of Aristotle, is said to have observed in one of his lectures that if the Pythagoreans were to be trusted, his audience would have the privilege of hearing him again: "You will be sitting there in the same way, and I shall be telling you my story, holding my little stick, and everything else will go on the same."
This mechanical reproduction of a whole previous age down to its minutest details did not, however, really engage the higher Greek thought. That was chiefly occupied with the { 242} abiding contrast between that which is and that which _appears_; how could the ultimate Unity present itself in such infinite diversity? what was the relation of the world of change and succession to the enduring substance that lay behind? In such questions man and his destiny had but a small share. Pindar might sing how "God accomplisheth all ends according to his wish; God who overtaketh the winged eagle and outstrippeth the dolphin of the sea, and layeth low many a mortal in his haughtiness, while to others he giveth glory unspeakable: if any man expect that in doing ought he shall be unseen of God, he erreth." The tragedians might wrestle with dark problems of crime and fate; and poetry and philosophy might agree in presenting the world as the scene of a divine thought, the manifestation of a divine energy. Regularities, fixities, invariable successions, pointed to a definite order, divinely maintained. But to what did it lead? What place was there in it for man? His future might be moralised; the unethical Hades of Homer might be replaced by the judgment-scenes of Plato; but no world-process is suggested for the elimination of evil or the fulfilment of any divine end. Plato might throw out the hint that Delphi should become the interpreter of religion to all mankind; the mysteries might be opened to slave as well as freeman, and might even admit those who were not of Hellenic race; but there were no prophet's { 243} glimpses of a purpose leading to some all-embracing goal. Zeus orders all as he wills. Individuals are punished, but the misdeeds, like the sufferings or sorrows of man, are lost in the harmonious majesty of the Whole.