Suppose that we had had to identify “becoming” with electrical potential-gradient instead of with entropy-change. We discover potential through the readings of a voltmeter. The numerical reading stands for something in the condition of the world, but we form no picture of what that something is. In scientific researches we only make use of the numerical value—a code-number attached to a background outside all conception. It would be very interesting if we could relate this mysterious potential to any of our familiar conceptions. Clearly, if we could identify the change of potential with the familiar moving on of time, we should have made a great step towards grasping its intrinsic nature. But turning from supposition to fact, we have to identify potential-gradient with force. Now it is true that we have a familiar conception of force—a sensation of muscular effort. But this does not give us any idea of the intrinsic nature of potential-gradient; the sensation is mere mind-spinning provoked by nervous impulses which have travelled a long way from the seat of the force. That is the way with all physical entities which affect the mind through the sense organs. The interposed nerve-mechanism would prevent any close association of the mental image with the physical cause, [Pg 97] even if we were disposed to trust our mental insight when it has a chance of operating directly. Or suppose that we had had to identify force with entropy-gradient. That would only mean that entropy-gradient is a condition which stimulates a nerve, which thereupon transmits an impulse to the brain, out of which the mind weaves its own peculiar impression of force. No one would feel intuitive objection to the hypothesis that the muscular sensation of force is associated with change of organisation of the molecules of the muscle. Our trouble is that we have to associate two things, both of which we more or less understand, and, so far as we understand them, they are utterly different. It is absurd to pretend that we are in ignorance of the nature of organisation in the external world in the same way that we are ignorant of the intrinsic nature of potential. It is absurd to pretend that we have no justifiable conception of “becoming” in the external world. That dynamic quality—that significance which makes a development from past to future reasonable and a development from future to past farcical—has to do much more than pull the trigger of a nerve. It is so welded into our consciousness that a moving on of time is a condition of consciousness. We have direct insight into “becoming” which sweeps aside all symbolic knowledge as on an inferior plane. If I grasp the notion of existence because I myself exist, I grasp the notion of becoming because I myself become. It is the innermost Ego of all which is and becomes.