vi DEVELOPMENT AND HARMONY 355 



path free from all interfering forces would maintain its 

 motion eternally in a straight line, or if moving in a 

 frictionless medium within the influence of some large 

 body, would rotate about it as a planet. But, normally, 

 the motion of one body is interfered with by others and it 

 is brought to rest. Some of its kinetic energy is then 

 re-translated into potential, but the whole is never restored. 

 On the cessation of molar motion the kinetic energy takes 

 other forms, and some portion of it is always frittered down 

 into heat. If the heat could as a whole be collected again 

 and brought to a focus, the sum of the original energy 

 would be restored and the entire system in its new form 

 would possess a potential energy equal to that with which 

 it originally started. But this physicists believe to be 

 impossible. They accordingly draw a distinction between 

 energy as such, and the energy which can or could be 

 made available to do mechanical work, and tell us that 

 while the sum of the former is constant, that of the latter 

 is perpetually diminishing. There is a steady dissipation 

 of available energy measured by the increase of c entropy.' 

 Thus the mechanical view of the universe, in strange 

 contrast with that of biology, psychology, and, as we may 

 now add, of astronomy, chemistry and the physical theories 

 of matter, contemplates a process of steady degradation or 

 dissolution rather than a process of evolution or develop- 

 ment. We start with a system of energy stored in many 

 centres of high potential, and as we trace its liberation from 

 these centres and the display of its nature in motion, we 

 have to recognise at every point a final dissipation into a 

 form in which it can no longer produce any recognisable 

 effects. 



That this can be a full account of the universal process 

 is impossible, for the simple reason that it gives no account 

 of the original storage. It assumes in Ostwald's way of 

 putting the matter, a perpetual transference of energy from 

 the points of greatest difference of potential to a state 

 nearer to equilibrium, but it gives no account of the manner 

 in which the difference of potential originally arose. It is 

 clearly a one-sided account, as might be expected of a 

 purely mechanical view, and rightly interpreted it is an 



