232 THE MECHANISM OF LIFE 



attains a condition of maximum entropy. From a pre-material 

 state it passes into an inert material state. 



This is the tendency, or direction, of the passage of nature. 



The Relativity of the Passage. Now one thinks about the 

 life passage in just the same way. If we are right in our inter- 

 pretation of life intuition as something indescribable (though 

 perfectly well "known" to us) which "runs down" in some 

 way, expressing itself in inert material manifestations, then the 

 life passage exhibits the same tendency, or direction, as does the 

 natural passage.* In Bergson's terminology it defends. Note 

 that all recent work interprets " matter," just as Descartes did, 

 as extension, and note that the quality of life, mind, memory, 

 intuition (call it what one likes), is that space measurements 

 cannot be made with regard to it. There is, therefore, some 

 quality in life that we express as intensitiveness, meaning the 

 opposite of extension. By detending this quality becomes 

 something extensive, and so capable of space measurements, and 

 therefore of physical investigation. That which Bergson puts 

 in this way we have tried to put in another way, but the idea 

 involved is the same one. 



Life, then, passes always into the inert material state, and the 

 passage is our intellectual description of it. 



Assume, now (if for no other reason than to see where the 

 assumption leads), that there is a stuff of nature, an environ- 

 ment of life, something other than life which exists as well as 

 life. Assume that our superficial investigation of nature tells us 

 that this environment does not remain the same, but passes into 

 an inert material state. Life, acting on this stuff of nature, 

 retards the progress of the latter towards the inert material state 

 (when life could no longer utilise it). It retards the augmentation 

 of entropy, but does not (cannot, in fact) prevent the ultimate 

 attainment of maximum entropy. As the temperature of the 

 sun falls life must (as we know it) become the less and less able 

 to persist, and must ultimately cease. That is our ordinary 

 conception of the relation of life to its environment. 



But it seems (since one has been compelled to think in another 

 way by the stimulus of the modern relativity theory) that we 

 may just as easily regard nature as something that is at rest, and 

 which does not pass, and hold that the apparent passage is due 

 to the passage of life. If the atmosphere is at rest, and if one 



* Remember the (easily ignored) fact, that of living substance we literally 

 know nothing. We study the behaviour only of a living organism. When- 

 ever we study organic substance, it is necessarily dead, inert material that 

 \vc investigate. 



