194 THE MECHANISM OF LIFE 



mechanics of Newton and his successors; the rise and develop- 

 ment of atomic chemistry; the wonderful progress that followed 

 • Faraday's discovery of the laws of electrical induction ; and then 

 the thermo-dynamic theory elaborated by Carnot, Joule, Ranlvine, 

 Kelvin, and Gibbs. Then came the electro-magnetic theory, of 

 Clerk Maxwell and those who followed him, and, in our own time, 

 the French and English work on radio-activity and the new physics 

 built up by J. J. Thomson, Planck, Einstein, and Nernst. This 

 latter theory, which is still in the making, is obviously the bridge 

 that will lead us across the gulf between matter and the physics 

 of the ether. Apparently, we have yet to find whether or not 

 physical science has said the last word in its effort to explain life. 



The Laws o£ Thermo-dynamics. — Go back now to our discus- 

 sion of the laws of thermo-dynamics. The first law, we have seen, 

 is really a kind of mental postulate, or convention. We make 

 up our minds that there is something that is permanent — that can 

 • neither be created nor annihilated — in all the changes that occur 

 in nature. This something we call energy. If it appears to arise 

 out of nothing, or to vanish into nothing, we simply do not 

 believe that apparent result, and we proceed to invent poten- 

 tialities that will account for the appearances or disappearances. 

 Usually we are successful, and we find that our hypotheses of 

 potential energies work, and we are so led to further discoveries. 

 Then we say that the things we are investigating are real ones, 

 since they are conserved. Or we may find (when we try to 

 investigate spooks) that our hypotheses — astral bodies, higher 

 planes of being, telepathy, and the like — do not work. They 

 mislead us. The test of their validity is that they should enable 

 us to predict, and we find no good evidence that they do so. 

 Therefore, being useless to us, and rather a nuisance, we say that 

 the phenomena of spiritualism are unreal. 



That is the first law — that something is conserved so that the 

 total quantity of it in our universe remains constant. It is not so 

 much a physical as an a priori " law," or mode of our mentality. 



The second law is quite different, inasmuch as there is nothing 

 at all a priori about it. It merely describes, in the most com- 

 prehensive way possible, our experience of the universe. It tells 

 us how things happen: that water runs downhill; that a red-hot 

 poker taken from the fire cools down to the temperature of the 

 room ; that a cigarette burns away, leaving behind it some ash, 

 water vapour, and carbonic acid gas, and evolving heat as it 



