OBJECTIVITY OF BECOMING 97 



even if we were disposed to trust our mental insight when 

 it has a chance of operating directly. 



Or suppose that we had had to identify force with 

 entropy-gradient. That would only mean that entropy- 

 gradient is a condition which stimulates a nerve, which 

 thereupon transmits an impulse to the brain, out of 

 which the mind weaves its own peculiar impression of 

 force. No one would feel intuitive objection to the 

 hypothesis that the muscular sensation of force is 

 associated with change of organisation of the molecules 

 of the muscle. 



Our trouble is that we have to associate two things, 

 both of which we more or less understand, and, so far 

 as we understand them, they are utterly different. It 

 is absurd to pretend that we are in ignorance of the 

 nature of organisation in the external world in the same 

 way that we are ignorant of the intrinsic nature of 

 potential. It is absurd to pretend that we have no 

 justifiable conception of "becoming" in the external 

 world. That dynamic quality — that significance which 

 makes a development from past to future reasonable 

 and a development from future to past farcical — has to 

 do much more than pull the trigger of a nerve. It is so 

 welded into our consciousness that a moving on of 

 time is a condition of consciousness. We have direct 

 insight into "becoming" which sweeps aside all sym- 

 bolic knowledge as on an inferior plane. If I grasp the 

 notion of existence because I myself exist, I grasp the no- 

 tion of becoming because I myself become. It is the in- 

 nermost Ego of all which is and becomes. 



The incongruity of symbolising this fundamental 

 intuition by a property of arrangement of the micro- 

 scopic constituents of the world, is evident. What this 

 difficulty portends is still very obscure. But it is not 



