THE REACTION FROM ANALYSIS 103 



The Scientific Reaction from Microscopic Analysis. From 

 the point of view of philosophy of science the con- 

 ception associated with entropy must I think be ranked 

 as the great contribution of the nineteenth century to 

 scientific thought. It marked a reaction from the view 

 that everything to which science need pay attention is 

 discovered by a microscopic dissection of objects. It 

 provided an alternative standpoint in which the centre 

 of interest is shifted from the entities reached by the 

 customary analysis (atoms, electric potentials, etc.) to 

 qualities possessed by the system as a whole, which 

 cannot be split up and located — a little bit here, and a 

 little bit there. The artist desires to convey significances 

 which cannot be told by microscopic detail and accord- 

 ingly he resorts to impressionist painting. Strangely 

 enough the physicist has found the same necessity; but 

 his impressionist scheme is just as much exact science 

 and even more practical in its application than his micro- 

 scopic scheme. 



Thus in the study of the falling stone the microscopic 

 analysis reveals myriads of separate molecules. The 

 energy of the stone is distributed among the molecules, 

 the sum of the energies of the molecules making up the 

 energy of the stone. But we cannot distribute in that 

 way the organisation or the random element in the 

 motions. It would be meaningless to say that a particu- 

 lar fraction of the organisation is located in a par- 

 ticular molecule. 



There is one ideal of survey which would look into 

 each minute compartment of space in turn to see what 

 it may contain and so make what it would regard as 

 a complete inventory of the world. But this misses 

 any world-features which are not located in minute 

 compartments. We often think that when we have 



