9 8 "BECOMING" 



irrelevant to certain signs of change which we may 

 discern in responsible scientific opinion with regard to 

 the question of primary and secondary law. The cast- 

 iron determinism of primary law is, I think, still widely 

 accepted but no longer unquestioningly. It now seems 

 clear that we have not yet got hold of any primary law 

 — that all those laws at one time supposed to be primary 

 are in reality statistical. No doubt it will be said that 

 that was only to be expected; we must be prepared for 

 a very long search before we get down to ultimate 

 foundations, and not be disappointed if new discoveries 

 reveal unsuspected depths beneath. But I think it might 

 be said that Nature has been caught using rather unfair 

 dodges to prevent our discovering primary law — that 

 kind of artfulness which frustrated our efforts to discover 

 velocity relative to the aether.* I believe that Nature is 

 honest at heart, and that she only resorts to these ap- 

 parent shifts of concealment when we are looking for 

 something which is not there. It is difficult to see now 

 any justification for the strongly rooted conviction in the 

 ultimate re-establishment of a deterministic scheme of 

 law except a supposed necessity of thought. Thought 

 has grown accustomed to doing without a great many 

 "necessities" in recent years. 



One would not be surprised if in the reconstruction 

 of the scheme of physics which the quantum theory is 

 now pressing on us, secondary law becomes the basis 

 and primary law is discarded. In the reconstructed 

 world nothing is impossible though many things are 

 improbable. The effect is much the same, but the kind 

 of machinery that we must conceive is altogether 

 different. We shall have further glimpses of this problem 

 and I will not here pursue it. Entropy, being a quantity 



* See p. 23i. 



