THE ORGANISM AS A NATURAL THING 15 



which organisms can grow, reproduce, behave or otherwise 

 function must be one in which energy in the available form is 

 present and is undergoing dissipation. 



5^. The Physical Status of Organisms in the Passage of 

 Nature. An environment, in which there are organisms, is to 

 some extent indeterminate : that is, it is impossible to predict 

 what any future state will be, knowing only the present and past 

 states. This indeterminism would exist even if our knowledge 

 of such an environing physical system w^ere quite complete. Let 

 this be quite clear : in a physically dead, " made " solar system 

 — one in which all energy were completely dissipated — there would 

 be absolute determinism so that any future state could be precisely 

 predicted from a knowledge of the masses, distances and motions 

 of the various bodies in the system. But in a solar system such 

 as our one is at the present time there cannot be absolute deter- 

 minism, for the system contains organisms. The degree of 

 indeterminism will depend on the degree to which the solar system 

 is already made and on the powers of the organisms : the less 

 the system is made (that is, the greater its available energy) and 

 the more highly evolved the organisms are, the greater will be 

 the degree of indeterminism. 



Let man, in his scientific phase, be the organism that we 

 consider. To prove our proposition it is necessary to show that 

 there is " free-will " in man — that is, that he can choose between 

 one action and another, or between acting and not-acting. He 

 must be free to deliberate and choose, that is, the choice that 

 he makes must not depend on what he has already done, or upon 

 anything in his environment. Clearly we are not absolutely free 

 in these ways — that is, we are, to some extent, constrained to act 

 in this way or that. The constraints depend on the condition 

 that our universe, or solar system, or environment, is partly made, 

 and to the extent that it is made there is determinism. We 

 have the intuition that we are free to choose between some 

 alternatives and this intuition regulates our conduct as social 

 organisms. Thus we praise or blame, punish or reward our 

 fellow-creatures according to the ways in which they act socially. 

 If we really believed that their actions were determined we should 

 not praise, blame, punish or reward. But we actually do so and 

 social systems are successfully built up accordingly. It is quite 

 impossible to prove that our actions are always strictly determined 



