time: the refreshing river 



The Two Views oj the Contradiction. 



We may now proceed to consider the two views which may be 

 held about this contradiction. They are as follows; — 



(i) The concepts of organisation as held by physicists and biologists 

 are the same; but all biological, and hence social, organisation 

 is kept going at the expense of an over-compensating degra- 

 dation of energy in metabolic upkeep. 



(2) The two concepts are quite different and incommensurable. We 

 should distinguish between Order and Organisation. 



First of all, can we find the first of these opinions explicitly stated ? 



Metabolism and Irreversibilty. 



It is not difficult to do so. The physicist, Schrodinger, refers to the 

 matter in his interesting book Science and the Human Temperament: 



"We are convinced," he writes, "that the second law governs 

 all physical and chemical processes, even if they result in the 

 most intricate and tangled phenomena, such as organic life, the 

 genesis of a complicated world of organisms from primitive 

 beginnings, and the rise and growth of human cultures. In this 

 connection the physicist's belief in a continually increasing dis- 

 order seems somewhat paradoxical, and may easily lead to a 

 very pessimistic misunderstanding of a thesis which actually 

 implies nothing more than the specific meaning assigned to it 

 by the physicist. Therefore a word of explanation is necessary. 



"We do not wish to assert anything more than that the total 

 balance of disorder in nature is steadily on the increase. In 

 individual sections of the universe, or in definite material systems, 

 the movement may well be towards a higher degree of order, 

 which is made possible because an adequate compensation occurs 

 in some other systems. Now according to what the physicist calls 

 'order,' the heat stored up in the sun represents a fabulous 

 provision for order, in so far as this heat has not yet been dis- 

 tributed equally over the whole universe (though its definite 

 tendency is towards that dispersion) but is for the time being 

 concentrated within a relatively small portion of space. The 

 radiation of heat from the sun, of which a small proportion 

 reaches us, is the compensating process making possible the 

 manifold forms of life and movement on the earth, which fre- 



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