Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/618

 J. DELBOEUF, LA MATIERE BRUTE, ETC. 605 cipitates itself towards its own destruction in spite of, and because of, the very efforts it makes to maintain itself " (p. 2). That this law, if applied to the sum of things, requires a final term, is in- contestable. It may be contended, however, that a different kind of final term would be more logically deduced. Instability, defect of equilibrium, Prof. Delboeuf says in one place, "is something," while stability is only a kind of residue from which nothing more can be obtained (p. 57). From this it seems to follow that the end of things, being absolute stability, must be the " absolute death " affirmed as the end in Mainlander's pessimistic Philosophy of Re- demption (see MIND xi. 416). If the whole process of things consists in a perpetual diminution of " free " force, then the unity of the world ought to be placed, as it is by Mainlander, at the beginning and not at the end. The more the theoretical basis of the Philo- sophy of Redemption is examined, the more clearly it will be seen to be a perfectly coherent (perhaps the only coherent) metaphysical doctrine starting from the assumption of the law of the degradation of energy as the most generalised expression of cosmical change. The precise extension of this law, however, is still a matter of dispute among physicists. Apart from any suppositions, such as are made in a recent scientific fiction, about unknown forms of energy, we may safely say that the law of the degradation of energy is not co-ordinate with the law of the conservation of energy, but is true only under special, and as yet imperfectly defined, conditions. Those who, like Prof. Delboeuf, apply it to the whole, ought to define clearly their assumptions as to the constitution of the whole. On slightly different suppositions, would not the process of things take the form of a cycle rather than of a movement from an absolute beginning to an absolute end? In Prof. Delboeuf's theory of the relations of stable and unstable matter, and of "mechanism" and free intelligence, there is both a speculative element and a positive element. The speculative element consists partly in the theory of the whole process of things that has just been discussed, partly in a theory that acts of free intelligence or will are strictly undetermined. The dis- tinction between the stable and the unstable, it is clear, is not bound up with the assumption that when once a certain portion of force is fixed, the possibilities of change are for ever dimi- nished by so much. And, similarly, the rejection of indetermin- ism does not affect the psychological distinction drawn between "free" intelligence and fixed habit or "mechanism". The doctrine to which Prof. Delboeuf's theory is really opposed is not determinism, but the doctrine that regards mechanism or uncon- scious habit as an expression of the perfection of an organism, and consciousness as a sort of aberration expressive of defective function. Again, the psychological distinction of mechanical habit and free intelligence can be maintained independently of any attempt to discover a corresponding objective distinction, such as that between stable and unstable matter ; though this last distinction, of course, has a value of its own. It may be