OBJECTIVITY OF BECOMING 95 



reality. We are convinced that a dynamic character 

 must be attributed to the external world; making all 

 allowance for mental imagery, I do not see how the 

 essence of "becoming" can be much different from 

 what it appears to us to be. On the other side we have 

 entropy which is frankly of a much more subjective 

 nature than most of the ordinary physical qualities. 

 Entropy is an appreciation of arrangement and or- 

 ganisation; it is subjective in the same sense that the 

 constellation Orion is subjective. That which is arranged 

 is objective, so too are the stars composing the con- 

 stellation; but the association is the contribution of the 

 mind which surveys. If colour is mind-spinning, so also 

 is entropy a mind-spinning — of the statistician. It has 

 about as much objectivity as a batting average. 



Whilst the physicist would generally say that the 

 matter of this familiar table is really a curvature of 

 space, and its colour is really electromagnetic wave- 

 length, I do not think he would say that the familiar 

 moving on of time is really an entropy-gradient. I am 

 quoting a rather loose way of speaking; but it reveals 

 that there is a distinct difference in our attitude towards 

 the last parallelism. Having convinced ourselves that 

 the two things are connected, we must conclude that 

 there is something as yet ungrasped behind the notion 

 of entropy — some mystic interpretation, if you like — 

 which is not apparent in the definition by which we 

 introduced it into physics. " In short we strive to see 

 that entropy-gradient may really be the moving on of 

 time (instead of vice versa). 



Before passing on I would note that this exceptional 

 appearance of subjective and objective apparently in 

 their wrong worlds gives food for thought. It may 

 prepare us for a view of the scientific world adopted in 



