174 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



structure remains unchanged in spite of a small change 

 in its inner equilibrium; hence the inner instability must 

 pass certain limits before the readjustment in equilibrium 

 takes place. The instance of a supersaturated solution is 

 a case in point, where the solidification or crystallisation 

 lags behind the conditions which bring it about. When 

 the change does come, it again proceeds too far; it swings 

 beyond the necessities of the case; it passes the limits of 

 perfect equilibrium on to the other side, so to say. From 

 too little adjustment it passes to too much adjustment, and 

 again there is a condition of instability which has to be 

 righted by a swing back in due course. Thence arises the 

 rhythmic character of natural change, which links it on to 

 the rhythm of the life-processes, and shows that they spring 

 from the same source in the inner nature of things. Hence 

 probably arise also the definite quantitative increments of 

 change which the New Physics reveals. 



This mysterious tendency to equilibrium or inner stability 

 shows the inner holistic character even of physico-chemical 

 structures. There is an internal balance which preserves 

 the type, a push-on when the structure is endangered from 

 one quarter, a pull-up when it is endangered from another. 

 These inner pushes and pulls are not the work of extraneous 

 demons, but represent the inner holistic nature even of 

 natural physical things in their total make-up. And the 

 pushes and pulls are adjusted into a great rhythmic process 

 which becomes the law of life in the next higher grade 

 of structures. We may call the structure a mechanism 

 and its action mechanical. But both ideas are but a super- 

 ficial view of the real facts, which are so remarkable as 

 to be almost as mysterious as the similar though more 

 complicated phenomena which meet us in the structures of 

 life. Not laissez-faire, not utter Chance and Hazard, but 

 control or governance meets us in the inner courts even 

 of physical nature. 



I envisage the physico-chemical structures of Nature as 

 the beginnings and earlier phases of Holism, and ^'life" 

 as a more developed phase of the same inner activity. 



