xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 215 



vibrations which appear to our temperature-sense as heat ? 

 Surely not : it means that each body receives as much 

 heat as it radiates, that the molecular motions 

 proceed with entire regularity and constant velocities. 

 But if so, is it not a condition of Activity (ev&pyeia), not 

 of Rest ? 



(&amp;lt;5) In the case of Life it is much easier to conceive 

 perfection as a changeless activity, because we are more 

 inclined to regard life as depending on a harmony 

 of changes rather than on their mutability, on the mere 

 instability of organic processes. Thus if with Spencer we 

 conceive life as an adjustment of internal to external 

 relations ( mutual adjustment would be better!), it is 

 evident that the success of life will depend on the degree 

 of correspondence, however attained, between the organism 

 and its environment. Perfect correspondence therefore 

 would be perfect life, and might be conceived as arising 

 by a gradual perfecting of the correspondence until the 

 organism either adapted itself completely to an unchanging 

 environment or instantaneously and pari passu to a 

 changing one, in such wise that the moment of non- 

 adaptation (if any) was too brief to come into consciousness. 

 In either case the relation of the organism to its 

 environment would be unchangingly the same. It would 

 persist therefore in being what it was, in expressing its 

 nature in its activities, without alteration or decay, gaining 

 nothing and losing nothing, because of the perfect 

 equipoise of waste and repair. 



That such an equilibrium is not unthinkable may 

 be illustrated also by the conceptions of a balance of 

 income and expenditure, of the stationary state of 

 economics and of perfect justice as a social harmony in 

 which each maintains his own position in society without 

 aggression on others. Surely in none of these cases could 

 it be asserted that there was a cessation of social or 

 industrial relations. Once more, does not the apparent 

 paradox arise merely out of the habit of interpreting 

 evepyeia aKivrjalas as a cessation of activity ? 



Yet it is this latter view which is really unthinkable, 



