THE ORGANIC AND THE INORGANIC 309 



any other part can do, yet does one thing only : it 

 becomes an endoderm cell, or an ectodermal cell, or a 

 part of the skeleton, and so on ; what it does depends 

 on its position with regard to the other cells. An 

 extensive manifoldness or diversity is produced, but 

 this was not the consequence of a preceding extensive 

 manifoldness, for in the preceding stage all the parts of 

 the system were the same. The manifoldness of the ovum 

 or blastula — that potential manifoldness which became 

 actual in development — must be an intensive manifold- 

 ness, and admitting this we must abandon the comparison 

 of the ontogenetic (and, of course, phylogenetic) pro- 

 cesses with the phases of a physico-chemical system in 

 process of transformation. Evolution is the transforma- 

 tion of an intensive into an extensive manifoldness. 



More than this — much more than this — must be 

 the difference between the transforming systems of 

 physics and the evolving systems of biology. There is 

 a quality, or sense, or direction in all naturally occurring 

 inorganic processes which is not like that of organic 

 evolutionary processes. We return now to the con- 

 sideration of the second law of thermodynamics, for 

 only in this way can we approach the notion of the 

 vital impetus. If an energy-transformation occurs in 

 inorganic nature, that is to say, if anything happens, 

 the transformation occurs or the thing happens because 

 there were diversities in the system in which it occurred. 

 The condition for inorganic happening is that there 

 must have been differences of energy in the different 

 parts of the system : in the most general sense there 

 must have been diversity of the elements. But with 

 the transformation this diversity disappears, or tends 

 to disappear, and it cannot be restored — that is, differ- 

 ences of energy cannot again be established unless by 

 a compensatory energy-transformation ; that is, energy 



