Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/477

 equilibrated universe cannot change and its latent energy cannot be used to change it. Ergo such a universe is ‘played out’.

But why should we not regard it as a case of, as a perfecting of Motion until it has everywhere become perfectly regular, steady, smooth and frictionless? Logically, in fact, this seems a far preferable alternative. Suppose, e.g., an equilibrium of temperature. If two bodies are at equal temperatures, does that mean that they have ceased to have temperature? Have they ceased to radiate out heat, or (to put it in terms of the current theory about heat) to exhibit the molecular vibrations which appear to our temperature-sense as heat? Surely not: it means that each body receives as much ‘heat’ as it radiates, that the ‘molecular motions’ proceed with entire regularity and constant velocities. But if so, is it not a condition of Activity, not of Rest?

(b) In the case of Life it is somewhat easier to conceive perfection as a changeless activity, because we are more inclined to regard life as depending on a harmony of changes rather than on the mere instability of organic processes. Thus if with Spencer we conceive life as an adjustment of internal to external relations (‘mutual adjustment’ would be better!), it is evident that the success of life will depend on the degree of correspondence, however attained, between the organism and its environment. Perfect correspondence therefore would be perfect life, and might be conceived as arising by a gradual perfecting of the correspondence until the organism either adapted itself completely to an unchanging environment or instantaneously and pari passu to a changing one, in such wise that the moment of non-adaptation (if any) was too brief to come into consciousness. In both these cases the relation of the organism to its environment would be unchangingly the same. It would persist therefore in being what it was, in expressing its nature in its activities, without alteration or decay, gaining nothing and losing nothing, because of the perfect equipoise of waste and repair.

That such an equilibrium is not unthinkable we may gather from the conceptions of a balance of income and expenditure, of the ‘stationary state’ of economics and of perfect justice as a social harmony in which each maintains his own position in society without aggression on others. Surely in none of these cases could it be asserted that there was a cessation of social or industrial relations. Once more the apparent paradox arises merely out of the habit of interpreting  as a cessation of activity.