94 "BECOMING" 



spoken of above; "becoming" has been turned into 

 "unbecoming". If we like we can now go on to account, 

 not for things becoming unshuffled, but for their un- 

 becoming shuffled — and, if we wish to pursue this aspect 

 further, we must discuss not the causes but the un- 

 causes. But, without tying ourselves into verbal knots, 

 the meaning evidently is that "becoming" gives a 

 texture to the world which it is illegitimate to reverse. 



Objectivity of Becoming. In general we should describe 

 the familiar world as subjective and the scientific world 

 as objective. Take for instance our former example of 

 parallelism, viz. colour in the familiar world and its 

 counterpart electromagnetic wave-length in the scientific 

 world. Here we have little hesitation in describing the 

 waves as objective and the colour as subjective. The 

 wave is the reality — or the nearest we can get to a 

 description of reality; the colour is mere mind-spinning. 

 The beautiful hues which flood our consciousness under 

 stimulation of the waves have no relevance to the ob- 

 jective reality. For a colour-blind person the hues are 

 different; and although persons of normal sight make 

 the same distinctions of colour, we cannot ascertain 

 whether their consciousness of red, blue, etc. is just like 

 our own. Moreover, we recognise that the longer and 

 shorter electromagnetic waves which have no visual 

 effect associated with them are just as real as the col- 

 oured waves. In this and other parallelisms we find the 

 objective in the scientific world and the subjective in the 

 familiar world. 



But in the parallelism between entropy-gradient and 

 "becoming" the subjective and objective seem to have 

 got on to the wrong sides. Surely "becoming" is a 

 reality — or the nearest we can get to a description of 



