What is more interesting, next to our personal life, than the personal life of the world? HE You will die, and the world as you see it will die also. The movement that created it by accident will destroy it by its own continuity. The vulgar eternity that you conceive is only a moment. Have you seen a top spinning? There is a moment, about the middle of its gyration, when the circles described by one of the points on its circumference are all described with a sensibly equal speed. The solar system, by its precision, should make us admit that the top of which we form some of the atoms is pretty nearly half way through its spin. Motion is not perpetual, as you know; so the gyration will go on with necessarily slackening speed, until the top lies down on its side and dies. I Oh! our dreams of eternity! HE Do I touch them? A man dies, a man is born. A world dies, a world is born. I Renewal is not eternity. HE It is not of eternity you dream, but of immobility. The eternity you have conceived is only a stoppage of movement. What should be conceived is the perpetuity of movement. Men, gods, and worlds; eternal movement walks us for a moment among the infinities of chance. I And so all human effort, our philosophies, our sciences, the dolorous and superb edifice of our civilisations.... HE Destiny is more beautiful than all civilisations. I But, if they must perish, let their memory at least remain in the intelligence of the gods! HE Can the gods survive the world that gave them birth? We are your brothers in mortality. Epicurus knew it. He never considered the gods as other than provisional immortals. Nor had he the singular idea of a unique god, infinite, eternal, &c. That belief had already been imported from Asia into Greece, but the Greeks, not understanding it, presented their whole pantheon in a body with an ironic immortality. Plato and Aristotle took it up, and tried to make it reasonable, but only succeeded in showing more clearly its philosophical inanity. I did not let Epicurus, whom I loved, lose his way in this metaphysic. God is a dream, charming or cruel, useful or dangerous according to the heads in which it reigns, but no more than a dream. Need I explain to you the impossibility of God? God for men is a matter not of reasoning but of sentiment. Your better philosophers have understood him so well that after denying him in their intellects they have hurried to affirm him in their hearts. That is what I should do, perhaps, if we had to remain on the level of humanity; but I am come to raise you above men,--for an instant, before letting you fall back again. I Master, have I displeased you? HE