314 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY 



low-temperature heat ; but more and more as our stores 

 of coal and oil are being depleted, the attention of men 

 is being directed to these sources of kinetic energy. 

 Waterwheels and windmills, and the more effective 

 mechanisms that must be evolved from these primitive 

 motors, will capture this waste energy and convert it 

 into the kinetic energy of machines serviceable to man, 

 or into the potential energy of chemical compounds 

 capable of storage and future utilisation. The study 

 of radio-activity has made us acquainted with the 

 enormous stores of potential energy locked up in the 

 atoms, and if it ever should become possible to utilise 

 this by the disintegration of these particles, the down- 

 ward trend of natural energetic processes will further 

 be retarded. 



Life, when we regard it from the point of view of 

 energetics, appears therefore as a tendency which is 

 opposed to that which we see to be characteristic of 

 inorganic processes. The direction of the latter is 

 towards the conversion of potential into kinetic energy, 

 and the equal distribution of the latter throughout all 

 the parts of the universe. The direction of the tendency 

 which we call life is towards the conversion of kinetic 

 into potential energy, or towards the establishment 

 and maintenance of differences of kinetic energy, where- 

 by the latter remains available for the performance of 

 work. In general terms, the effect of the movement 

 which we call inorganic is towards the abolition of 

 diversities, while that which we call life is towards the 

 maintenance of diversities. They are movements 

 which are opposite in their direction. 



What is cosmic evolution ? In all the hypotheses 

 which astronomical physics has imagined we see the 

 transformation of a system — a part of the universe 

 arbitrarily detached from all the rest — through a series 



