But a man is capable of other forms of life, and to realize these he must keep the pig-life in check, not despising or disowning it, but restraining it, lest it should throw him out of harmony. Unchecked, it will do that in the long run; but what if he is to have no long run? Where the lower life can yield an hour of delight, why deny it for the sake of a higher life, if in the next hour both must end together? I confess that I see no escape from the implied conclusion if the premiss is true. But if the view of life outlined in these pages be true, then this premiss is palpably false. Neither the higher nor the lower life can ever have any end, though no doubt they may pass into forms outside the category of Time, in which the terms beginning and end have no longer any meaning. Life is not dependent on its visible and tangible forms. The question here involved is one on which the drift of certain modern speculations in physics obliges us to dwell for a little. The question of the present inhabitability of Mars or other planets has been much debated of late, pro and con. Opinions differ on this point; but there is a very general agreement among physicists that the state of the moon, cold, dead, and barren as a burnt-out cinder, must, by the equalization of energy, be sooner or later the necessary fate of every planet and of every sun in the universe. Science has thus apparently come to justify by its solemn verdict that cry of the Latin poet, more charged with the pathos of eternal death than perhaps any other human utterance:— “Soles occidere et redire possunt: Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, Nox est perpetua una dormienda.”[155] The conditions under which life is possible will then no longer exist. One nothingness awaits the saint, the sage, the ox, the oak tree, and the fungus. “Life,” says Le Dantec, “has not always existed on the earth”; we are to regard it as merely “a surface accident in the history of the thermic evolution of the globe.”[156]