In regard to the first question, we remark in general: _The common conviction of our race in all ages has been that the existing order of the universe had a beginning, and will have an end._ It has been affirmed by some mental philosophers that mankind has an intuitive and natural belief in the uniformity of nature, and the consequent stability and permanence of the universe. Reid, the father of the Scottish school of philosophy, says, "God has implanted in the human mind an original principle by which he believes in and expects the continuance of the course of nature." It is a matter of surprise that so acute a thinker should have fallen into so flagrant an error. He has evidently confounded our natural belief in causation with our acquired experiences of uniformity. That "like causes will always produce like effects" is a native intuition; but that "the same causes will always continue in operation, and always operate with the same intensity," is a mere presumption. Our faith in the uniformity and permanent stability of nature is an induction from experience, and not a natural and necessary intuition of the mind.[131] Far from entertaining a belief in the permanence and stability of the present order of nature, the great mass of mankind in earlier times regarded the system of things as liable to constant interference on the part of supernatural powers. In all ages of the world the existing order of nature has been regarded as temporal, and the flow of terrestrial and even of cosmical events has been conceived as liable to be broken up by universal revolutions. The historical evidence of this universal belief in "geological catastrophes" has been fully brought forward by Dr. Winchell in his "Sketches of Creation."[132] Traditions of a primal chaos and of periodic cataclysms are found among the Greeks, Egyptians, Phœnicians, Chaldæans, Hebrews, Persians, Arabians, Hindoos, South Sea Islanders, and the Aztecs. And among those nations in which the physical sciences have been cultivated the same conceptions are still entertained. As science has extended our acquaintance with natural phenomena in all parts of the earth, and beyond the earth into the celestial spaces, men have gradually attained a belief in the uniformity of nature. But the doctrine of periodical catastrophes has not been abandoned by scientific men. When men now speak of the uniformity of nature, they use that term in a very large sense, and even loose sense, as including catastrophes and convulsions of an intense and extensive kind;[133] and, as we shall presently see, the most advanced and exact modern science teaches us to contemplate a grand final catastrophe in which all life will be extinguished on the earth, and the globe itself shall be "ensepulchred in an extinguished sun." The attempt, therefore, to represent the belief in the uniformity of nature as a universal and necessary truth is vain. We have no _à priori_ ground for believing in the permanence of the universe.