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.
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