64 ORGANIC FUNCTIONING 



the movement of a trigger mechanism fires a gun ; an initial 

 swing of the pendulum of a clock at rest initiates the fall 

 of the weights and the actuation of the mechanism ; a small 

 spark ignites the explosive mixture in the cylinder of a gas 

 engine ; a nervous impulse causes substances in the muscles of 

 a man to disintegrate, so that the fibres contract ; and so on. 



The quantity of energy involved in a releasing transformation 

 is always small relatively to that involved in the main transforma- 

 tion. Also there is no proportionality between the two 

 transformations. 



22. ON THE LAWS OF ENERGETICS 



22a. The Law of Physical Becoming. By " physical 

 becoming " is meant the occurrences of energy-transformation 

 which are manifest to us as physical changes, or " phenomena " 

 (in the ordinary sense of the word). Such transformations have 

 sequence and direction such that in their occurrences the function 

 called entropy increases in value (see Section 22^). Such events 

 differ from those that must characterize a physically '' dead " 

 universe (see Section 2e) in a way that is analogous to that in 

 which vector quantities differ from scalar quantities. 



In order that physical becoming may exist, available energy 

 must be present in the system of things considered. Or, putting 

 the matter in ways that mean the same thing, there must be 

 differences of energy-intensity or potential ; or there must be 

 " organization " of energies (see further in Section 4). 



22b. The Law of Conservation. In the classical physics 

 (of half a century ago) matter was said to be conserved — that is, 

 did not ever originate and was incapable of being annihilated. 

 But since the discovery of radio-active disintegration of some 

 chemical atoms the precision of this '' Law " has disappeared, 

 for in such processes matter clearly disappears. 



Mass, that is the " property " of inertia of crude matter, or 

 of electro-magnetic entities, was said to be conserved, but 

 quantity of mass is now known to be relative to the velocity of 

 motion of an entity known to have mass. 



How^ever, since in radio-active transformations lost matter 

 is quantitatively replaced by energy ; and since change of mass 

 that is relative to something else can be explained away by mathe- 



