Were the other view of an original universal homogeneity correct, how conies it that we have still co-existent every stage of advance from the lowest to the highest, and that there is not a greater equality?--a difficulty which does not exist if we suppose things to have been _on the whole,_ as they are now, from the very first. But whichever view we take; whether we suppose all things collectively to oscillate between recurring extremes of "sameness" and "otherness;" or every stage of the wave of progress from crest to trough, to be simultaneously manifested in the universe at all times, the old difficulty of "the beginning" will force itself upon us. A process _ab aeterno_ is at least as unimaginable as the process of creation _ex nihilo;_ if it be not altogether inconceivable to boot. And the alternative is, either a primordial state of homogeneous matter which contains the present cosmos in germ, and from which it is evolved without the aid of any environment--such a germ claiming a designer as much as any ready-made perfect world; or else, a primordial state of things like that which we should get at any cross-section of the secular process, in which every stage of life and death, growth and decay, evolution and involution, is represented as now. This would include fossils and remains of past civilizations which (in the hypothesis) would never have existed; and would be in all respects as difficult as the crudest conception of the creation-hypothesis. And if this absurdity drives us back to primordial homogeneity, as before, we must remember that here, too, though not so evidently, we should have all the signs of an antecedent process that was non-existent. Life and death, corruption and integration, are parts of one undulatory process. Cut the wave where you will its curve claims to be finished in both directions and suggests a before as well as an after. If, in the very nature of things, the pendulum sways between confusion and order, chaos and cosmos, each extreme intrinsically demands the other, not only as its consequent, but as its antecedent; and the first chaos, no less than any succeeding one, will seem the ruin of a previous cosmos. Therefore we are driven back upon a process _ab aeterno_ with every stage of evolution always simultaneously represented in one part or other of the whole. Whatever mitigation such a conception may offer, surely we may be excused for still adhering to that simpler explanation which involves a mystery indeed, but nothing so positively unthinkable as a process without a beginning.