general psychological world, we see that the idea arose with something like logical necessity, that it has broad theoretic grounds.
First, we must remember that to Nietzsche the world was a finite quantity (as explained in the last chapter). Undulations in the amount of existence, now more and now less, were to him unthinkable. He believed that the modern doctrine of the conservation of energy pointed that way. Fixed or definite, and infinite were contradictory terms. A refusal to speak of infinite force he regarded as one of the marks of scientific, in contrast with the old religious habits of thought.[1] Second, he refused to admit the idea of empty space around the world. The notion of infinite space was gratuitous; he thought it based on the conception of empty space, which is an abstraction and unreal, all space being full of force of some kind. Space itself, as a separate category from matter or force, was an unreality, a subjective form.[2] But on the other hand (thirdly), he had come by this time to believe in the reality of time; there was a before and after irrespective of our thought or experience of it—and to this before and after no limits could be set, it was infinite.[3] a We have then so far a finite sum of force working in infinite time. And now, following ordinary ideas of causality, he argues that there can have been no beginning to the activity of the force (this a fourth point), that change of some kind must have been forever going on. But, the question may be asked, Granting all this, may not the activity at some time come to an end? May not an equilibrium be finally reached—a state in which, activity having played its part, becoming passes into being, a changeless goal of all preceding change? Nietzsche does not deny that this is conceivable, but he argues that if it were really possible, the goal would have been already reached, since time extends infinitely backwards as well as forwards and in absolutely unlimited time everything that could have happened must have happened. The simple fact then that an equilibrium does not exist now (for once reached, it would last forever), proves that there never was an equilibrium, and never
