730 
NATURE 
[JUNE 2, 1923 

This we may consider, first, as having immediate self- 
interest. On the strictly mechanistic outlook, it must 
regard all other organisms and conscious persons merely 
as moving objects similar to those other objects called 
inorganic. But even a purely physical description of 
the organism is not to be obtained, and by no process 
called scientific can the self-conscious person explain 
his ow consciousness in terms of mathematics and 
physics. Further, he sees other organisms that are 
not self-conscious, and so the mere biological life- 
conception fails to explain consciousness in other 
organisms than himself. So he is bound to make yet 
another fundamental conception, that of the conscious, 
self-interested organism; but even that is not all. 
Almost every action that he performs—as a member 
of a human community—means that he recognises 
other conscious, self-interested persons like himself : 
otherwise he would not seek to convince them, nor 
would he praise, or blame, or pity, or like, or hate 
them. On the purely mechanistic outlook, the things 
that he does, every conscious minute of his life, are 
meaningless. 
Then, even the purely physical thing is not a unit. 
Anything that is known to us is known only when it 
changes. When it changes it does so only because 
other things in the physical system to which it belongs 
also change. In the long run, the only isolated physical 
system that we know is the whole universe, and it is 
only by convention that we arbitrarily isolate a thing 
from all the rest of Nature. So also the functioning 
and behaviour of an organism means that it Is acting 
on, or reacting with, or adapting itself to the environ- 
ment—which is the whole universe. The self-conscious 
person (which is also a physical thing and an organism) 
is only such because it reacts with other self-conscious 
persons. Add to this the literally true conception that 
all organisms, conscious or unconscious, are materially 
and strictly continuous in the time dimension, then the 
whole world is one, and personality is everywhere in it. 
Thus, to the physical categories of substance, 
necessity, relation, modality, quantity, etc., we must 
add those of life, consciousness, and personality. The 
personality is universal in time and space and is God. 
Next we have Mr. Julian Huxley’s interpretation of 
the passage of Nature as a progress. But evolution, 
he sees quite well, is not necessarily a passage from 
the “simple to the complex.” It is quite as easy to 
look upon the “lower” organism as more complex 
than the “ higher ” one—just because it is undifferen- 
tiated. It is plain that the morphological, evolutionary 
series of changes is irreversible, and that the goal 
towards which all organic races tend, as they specialise, 
is extinction. How, then, to define “progress” ? 
There is a series of changes that have led up to the 
NO. 2796, VOL. 111] 

human race; let us attach a series of “ values” to 
these changes, thus making a one-to-one correspondence, 
value to morphological change. What are the values ? 
Those conditions judged by the human mind to have 
value are values. Progress then is the series of evolu- — 
tionary changes that have hwman value, and it is, 
somehow, a tendency towards good. It is an obscure 
feeling “ clarified and put on a firm intellectual footing 
by biology.’ It is true that the problems of evil, of 
pain, of strife, of death, of insufficiency and of im- — 
perfection remain to perplex us, but nevertheless 
progress is an element “essential to an externally 
grounded conception of God,” to be incorporated into — 
the common theology of the future. 
Finally, there is Sir Oliver Lodge’s interpretation of 
evolution as an effort: a conception which is more 
fundamental than any other that is touched in this 
discussion. Why, in the physical sense, have changes, 
or reactions, or events occurred at all? The answer is 
clear. If, by any change, a system can lose free energy 
or dissipate its energy, or increase its entropy-value 
(roughly equivalent statements), then that change will 
occur of itself. When the free energy has become 
minimal, or the entropy maximal, changes in the 
system will cease altogether. Now the only system 
which, in strict logic, we can consider is the whole 
universe. 
value, or when all energy has become universally dissi- 
pated, all changes in the universe, all events, or pheno- 
mena (from our human point of view) will have ceased. 
The world-paradox is that the universe is still the 
locus of change. Given an unbounded past, complete 
and final dissipation, with cessation of change, ought 
already to have been attained. The passage of Nature 
is thus towards materiality, or inertia, or passivity, 
but the passage is not accomplished—though it ought 
to have been accomplished. The world can only be 
the locus of activity and change because something 
resists, has arrested, or at least has retarded the 
passage towards materiality. There is an effort against 
inertia and this is life—the only physical conception 
of life that appears to be possible. There is a spiritual 
as well as a material passage. 
Now why are there separate personalities at all? 
On Sir Oliver Lodge’s general line of argument it may 
be reasoned (by analogy) that personality itself ought 
to exhibit a passage, or ought to be dissipated or 
absorbed into the universal personality, which is God. 
Why are they not so absorbed? Something, then, 
resists the ultimate dissipation of personality, just as 
life resists universal energy-dissipation. This some- 
thing is the “ invaluable but rather terrible and fearfully 
responsible grant ” of Free Will, against which even 
Deity itself strives. eae 
When entropy has attained its maximum ~ 

