[4] Except that, of course, the reactions that are supposed to occur are very complex ones.
[5] The reader may recognise in this argument that of Driesch’s Three Windows into the Absolute.
[7] The principal reason why we do not believe in phantasms is that these appearances are not conserved.
[8] See appendix, p. [369]. Entropy is a shadowy kind of concept, difficult to grasp. But again we may point out that the reader who would extend the notion of mechanism into life simply must grasp it.
[9] Meteorites, cosmic dust, and other small particles moving in the solar system within influence of the sun’s gravity.
[10] Not entirely, of course, but whatever be the transformation it ends in heat production.
[11] Absolute temperature is Centigrade temperature +273. This is, of course not a full definition, but it is sufficient for our present discussion.
[12] It is really necessary to lay stress on the distinction between available and unavailable energy, as it is one which many biologists appear to ignore. Thus, a popular book on the making of the earth attempts to argue that essential distinctions between living and inorganic matter are non-existent. One of these distinctions is that organisms absorb energy, and this author points to the absorption of “latent heat” by melting ice as an example of the absorption of energy in a purely physical process. Consider a system consisting of a block of ice and a small steam boiler. We can obtain work from this by the melting of the ice—that is, its “absorption of latent heat.” The system, ice at 0° C. + steam at 100° C., possesses available energy, but the system, melted ice + condensed steam, both at the same temperature, contains none. The molecules of water at 0° C. “absorb energy,” that is to say, their kinetic energy becomes greater, but their available energy in the system has disappeared. In saying that the organism absorbs energy, we mean, of course, that it accumulates available energy, that is, the power of producing physical transformations. (See further, appendix, p. [366].)
[13] Bryan, Thermodynamics: Teubner, Leipzig, 1907, p. 40.