THE ORGANISM AS A MECHANISM 51 



once the type of useful knowledge and of knowledge 

 of sequences of events rigidly determined knowledge 

 in short that is mechanistic ; and which has been 

 engendered by the necessity for acting on our en- 

 vironment in our own interests. 



All this, the reader may note, is Bergson's theory 

 of intellectual knowledge, a theory which, new and 

 paradoxical at first, becomes more and more convinc- 

 ing the longer we think about it, until at last it seems 

 so obvious that we wonder that it ever seemed new. 

 Our modes of thinking become constrained into certain 

 grooves, just because these modes of thinking have 

 been those that were generated by our modes of acting. 

 So long as our thinking relates only to our acting, its 

 exercise is legitimate. But if its object is pure specula- 

 tion its results may be illusory, for a method has been 

 applied to objects other than those for which it was 

 evolved. Let us now extend our intellectual methods 

 to the investigation of the organism. Necessarily we 

 must reason about the latter as a mechanism if we 

 reason about it at all. 



If it is a mechanism it must conform to the laws 

 of energetics, for science, so far as it is quantitative, 

 whether its results are expressed in the form of equa- 

 tions or inequalities, is based on these principles. 



The first principle of energetics, 1 or the first law of 

 thermodynamics, is that of the conservation of energy. 

 Let us think of an isolated system of parts such as the 

 sun with its assemblage of planets, satellites, and other 

 bodies : in reality these do not form an isolated system, 

 but we can regard them as such by supposing that 

 just as much energy is received by them from the rest 

 of the universe as is radiated off by them to the rest 

 of the universe. In this system, then, the sum of a 



1 See appendix, p. 356. 



