factor involving effort towards living well, and still less of any effort toward living better. This stage of static life never truly attains stability. It represents a slow, prolonged decay in which the complexity of the organism gradually declines towards simpler forms.
In this general description of the primitive function of Reason in animal life, the analogy of a living body, with its own self-contained organization, to the self-contained physical organization of the material universe as a whole, has been closely followed. The material universe has contained in itself, and perhaps still contains, some mysterious impulse for its energy to run upwards. This impulse is veiled from our observation, so far as concerns its general operation. But there must have been some epoch in which the dominant trend was the formation of protons, electrons, molecules, and stars. Today, so far as our observations go, they are decaying. We know more of the animal body, through the medium of our personal experience. In the animal body, we can observe the appetition towards the upward trend, with Reason as the selective agency. In the general physical universe we cannot obtain any direct knowledge of the corresponding agency by which it attained its present stage of available energy. The aggregations of energy in the form of protons, electrons, molecules, cosmic dust, stars, and planets, are there. However vast may be the scale of the physical order, it appears to be finite, and it is wasting at a finite rate.
