Despite Nietzsche's conclusion that the known facts of existence do not bear it out, and the essential impossibility of discussing it to profit, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is by no means unthinkable. The celestial cycle put forward, as an hypothesis, by modern astronomy--the progression, that is, from gas to molten fluid, from fluid to solid, and from solid, by catastrophe, back to gas again--is easily conceivable, and it is easily conceivable, too, that the earth, which has passed through an uninhabitable state into a habitable state, may one day become uninhabitable again, and so keep seesawing back and forth through all eternity.
criticism · Eternal Recurrence
Recurrence not unthinkable
Mencken judges that, although Nietzsche found no factual support for it, eternal recurrence is not unthinkable, since astronomy's hypothesis of cosmic cycles from gas to solid and back makes it easily conceivable.
- Eternal recurrenceWeighs the doctrine's plausibility against modern astronomical hypotheses.