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same order as that which we have already indicated in relation 

 to physical changes. 



The reader may now see the cloven hoof of Bergsonism in 

 the above argument. Life is that which sets itself against, and 

 tries to arrest the general tendency to inertia. In his distrust of 

 metaphysics he may attach slight value to such a view of the 

 organism, but, approached from the standpoint of the second 

 law of thermodynamics as only a probability, the Bergsonian 

 speculation may not appear to be so fantastic after all. A theory 

 of the organism must, it seems to us, take account of the second 

 law of energetics as having a double sign. It may be, of course, 

 that the activities of the organism are capable of reduction to 

 chemical and physical processes, all of which are to be regarded 

 as special cases of the second law — in that event biology is only 

 a department of physical chemistry, and our conception of life 

 must be a mechanistic one. But so long as physiology fails to 

 provide physico-chemical explanations of vital processes, and so 

 long as another physics and chemistry than that of the second 

 law is conceivable, then a real science of biology may be possible; 

 and to insist on a mechanistic conception of the organism is only 

 to dogmatise. 



