In our little sphere of terrestrial observation we see that, through all the transformations of matter and motion, the same quantity of each remains, though under new forms. Living beings afford a perpetual illustration of this: they are born, they grow by appropriating substances from the world without, and when they die they break up and restore to nature the elements of which they are composed. But by a law whose action never ceases other bodies are constituted from these same elements. Every star may be likened to an organized being, even as regards its internal heat. A body is alive so long as respiration and the circulation of the blood makes it possible for the various organs to perform their functions. When equilibrium and repose are reached, death follows; but after death all the substances of which the body was formed are wrought into other beings. Dissolution is the prelude to recreation. Analogy leads us to believe that the same is true of the cosmos. Nothing can be destroyed. _There is an incommensurable Power, which we are obliged to recognize as limitless in space and without beginning or end in time, and this Power is that which persists through all the changes in those sensible appearances under which the universe presents itself to us._ For this reason there will always be suns and worlds, not like ours, but still suns and worlds succeeding each other through all eternity. And for us this visible universe can only be the changing _appearance_ of the absolute and eternal _reality_. Α It is in virtue of this transcendent law that, long after the death of the earth, of the giant planets and the central luminary, while our old and darkened sun was still speeding through boundless space, with its dead worlds on which terrestrial and planetary life had once engaged in the futile struggle for daily existence, another extinct sun, issuing from the depths of infinity, collided obliquely with it and brought it to rest!