Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/149

88 movement and the average direction of the motions is constant and unchangeable; that an unvarying correlation of all the various modes of motion exists, so that each mode is convertible into its correlates at a constant numerical rate, and so that each, having passed the entire circuit of correlated forms, returns again into its own form undiminished in amount: all this seems to point unmistakably to a primal energy — aground-form of moving activity — in itself one and unchangeable, immanent in its sum of correlated forms, but not transcending them, while each instance of each form is only a transient and evanescent mode of this single Reality.

Nor is this inference weakened by the later scholium upon the principle of conservation, known as the principle of the Dissipation of Energy. On the contrary, the pantheistic significance of the principle of conservation seems to be greatly deepened by this. Instead of a constant whole of moving activity, exhibited in a system of correlated modes of motion, we now have a vaster correlation between the sum of actual energies and a vague but prodigious mass of potential energy — the “waste-heap,” as the phy-