“Guiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, we are not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief--let us say, rather, indulging a hope--that the processes we have ventured to contemplate will be renewed for ever, and for ever, and for ever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?” (Poe’s _Eureka_.) Now Nietzsche would not have spoken of a “Heart Divine,” even explaining, as Poe did, that this heart was our own; but he did contemplate a perpetually self-renewing Universe. Only--and herein lay the importance of his idea to himself--he saw it renewing itself in every detail, in every minutest action of the minutest of its individual parts, at every moment of its cycle. Every moment of the future being dependent upon and involved in the present moment, sooner or later in the course of time there would come a moment similar in every detail to a moment that had already existed, thus guaranteeing a similar series of moments till it should recur, and so on. He said: “If the Universe may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy, as a definite number of centres of energy--and every other concept remains indefinite and therefore useless--it follows therefrom that the Universe must go through a calculable number of combinations in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence. In infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must once have been realised; not only this, but it must have been realised an infinite number of times. And inasmuch as between every one of these combinations and its next recurrence, every other possible combination would necessarily have been undergone, and since every one of these combinations would determine the whole series in the same order, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated; the Universe is thus shown to be a circular movement which has already repeated itself an infinite number of times, and which plays its game for all eternity.” Nietzsche, hypnotised by this idea, believed it new, but there is a clear suggestion of it in the third book of Lucretius’ poem: “Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omne Praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai Multimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis, Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta Haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse: Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente: Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vageque Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”