But in the parallelism between entropy-gradient and “becoming” the subjective and objective seem to have got on to the wrong sides. Surely “becoming” is a reality—or the nearest we can get to a description of [Pg 95] reality. We are convinced that a dynamic character must be attributed to the external world; making all allowance for mental imagery, I do not see how the essence of “becoming” can be much different from what it appears to us to be. On the other side we have entropy which is frankly of a much more subjective nature than most of the ordinary physical qualities. Entropy is an appreciation of arrangement and organisation; it is subjective in the same sense that the constellation Orion is subjective. That which is arranged is objective, so too are the stars composing the constellation; but the association is the contribution of the mind which surveys. If colour is mind-spinning, so also is entropy a mind-spinning—of the statistician. It has about as much objectivity as a batting average. Whilst the physicist would generally say that the matter of this familiar table is really a curvature of space, and its colour is really electromagnetic wave-length, I do not think he would say that the familiar moving on of time is really an entropy-gradient. I am quoting a rather loose way of speaking; but it reveals that there is a distinct difference in our attitude towards the last parallelism. Having convinced ourselves that the two things are connected, we must conclude that there is something as yet ungrasped behind the notion of entropy—some mystic interpretation, if you like—which is not apparent in the definition by which we introduced it into physics. In short we strive to see that entropy-gradient may really be the moving on of time (instead of vice versa). Before passing on I would note that this exceptional appearance of subjective and objective apparently in their wrong worlds gives food for thought. It may prepare us for a view of the scientific world adopted in the later chapters which is much more subjective than that [Pg 96] usually held by science. The more closely we examine the association of entropy with “becoming” the greater do the obstacles appear. If entropy were one of the elementary indefinables of physics there would be no difficulty. Or if the moving on of time were something of which we were made aware through our sense organs there would be no difficulty. But the actual combination which we have to face seems to be unique in its difficulty.