One of the logical consequences of this is that, without any miracle or the assumption of any supernatural influences, it would be possible to foretell the most distant events in all their smallest details. An intelligence sufficiently wide and penetrating would, following the strict law of causation, be able to produce all lines of the present with absolute certainty immeasurably far into the future. As everything that ever will be necessarily must be, it virtually exists at present and has always existed; therefore it is only a question of clarity of vision, which however, is denied to man, to see it at any time and to any extent. The illusion of flux is explicable. Life, which like all world processes is a cyclical motion, is passed in an endless alternation between the shining forth and extinction of consciousness, the bearers of which are an everlasting series of organisms following one another. Every organism lasts a limited time, during which it is carried along an inconceivably small fraction of the tremendous cycle. It sees all the points of this short stretch but once, and does not learn that they are eternally the same. It gathers the false impression that they fly past it, whereas they are at rest and it passes them, until it ceases to be a suitable bearer of consciousness and disappears, making room for a successor. This rigid immutability of the whole Universe is certainly intolerably gruesome to the imagination, but then, every time we look beyond the narrow confines of life and human circumstances, to peep into the infinity and eternity which surrounds us, do not terrifying vistas open up before us? Not only the religious minded, but many free thinkers, too, have Free Will at heart, though the latter are otherwise guiltless of any mysticism. They claim it in the name of man's dignity, which would be deeply humiliated if we had to confess ourselves the slaves of outside influences, automata moved by universal causation without our having any say in the matter. We are not entitled to such trumpery pride. Let us seek our dignity in our striving for knowledge, in the subjection of our own instincts to the control of our Reason, but not in an imaginary independence of the laws of Nature, whose commands we should oppose in vain.