106 "BECOMING" 



worse than mass, distance, and the like which surely 

 must have some significance beyond mere numbers; if 

 so, that significance is lost on their incorporation into 

 the scientific scheme — the world of shadows. 



You may be inclined to regard my insistence that 

 entropy is something excluded from the inventory of 

 microscopic contents of the world as word-splitting. If 

 you have all the individuals before you, their associations, 

 arrangement and organisation are automatically before 

 you. If you have the stars, you have the constellations. 

 Yes; but if you have the stars, you do not take the 

 constellations seriously. It had become the regular 

 outlook of science, closely associated with its materialistic 

 tendencies, that constellations are not to be taken 

 seriously, until the constellation of entropy made a 

 solitary exception. When we analyse the picture into 

 a large number of particles of paint, we lose the aes- 

 thetic significance of the picture. The particles of paint 

 go into the scientific inventory, and it is claimed that 

 everything that there really was in the picture is kept. 

 But this way of keeping a thing may be much the same 

 as losing it. The essence of a picture (as distinct from 

 the paint) is arrangement. Is arrangement kept or lost? 

 The current answer seems inconsistent. In so far as 

 arrangement signifies a picture, it is lost; science has 

 to do with paint, not pictures. In so far as arrangement 

 signifies organisation it is kept; science has much to do 

 with organisation. Why should we (speaking now as 

 philosophers, not scientists) make a discrimination 

 between these two aspects of arrangement? The dis- 

 crimination is made because the picture is no use to the 

 scientist — he cannot get further with it. As impartial 

 judges it is our duty to point out that likewise entropy 

 is no use to the artist — he cannot develop his outlook 

 with it. 



