THE MEANING OF DISSOLUTION 



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reasons why it may appear untenable. Further- 

 more, it bears the inevitable implication that to 

 this strictly finite process there must have been a 

 beginning. 



If the universe, as Robert Boyle and Paley 

 thought, be like a clock or watch, made and wound 

 by an Almighty Clockmaker, it is to be expected 

 that this world-machine will ultimately run down 

 and stop not even the cosmos as a whole is to be 

 regarded as a perpetual -motion machine. Or if 

 we regard the universe as a living thing, whose 

 motion is the evidence of its life, we may expect 

 that, like other living things, it must ultimately 

 die. Its substance will remain intact, as the 

 doctrine of the conservation of energy assures us, 

 but its life will have ceased; it will be merely a 

 corpse immune from decay. 



Now there is a well-established " law " of thermo- 

 dynamics, discovered by Lord Kelvin in 1852, which 

 bears directly upon these two metaphors that re- 

 gard the life or activity of the universe, though 

 not its mere existence, as having had a beginning 

 and as destined to end. The doctrine of the dissi- 

 pation of energy teaches us that, while energy 

 never disappears, it ever tends to become unavail- 

 able. For the purposes of the present argument 

 we may regard heat as the common or undiffer- 

 entiated form of energy which all the other forms 

 constantly tend to assume. Now heat, like water, 

 must always "seek its own level," and when we 

 suitably arrange any system of which one part is 

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