You may be inclined to regard my insistence that entropy is something excluded from the inventory of microscopic contents of the world as word-splitting. If you have all the individuals before you, their associations, arrangement and organisation are automatically before you. If you have the stars, you have the constellations. Yes; but if you have the stars, you do not take the constellations seriously. It had become the regular outlook of science, closely associated with its materialistic tendencies, that constellations are not to be taken seriously, until the constellation of entropy made a solitary exception. When we analyse the picture into a large number of particles of paint, we lose the aesthetic significance of the picture. The particles of paint go into the scientific inventory, and it is claimed that everything that there really was in the picture is kept. But this way of keeping a thing may be much the same as losing it. The essence of a picture (as distinct from the paint) is arrangement. Is arrangement kept or lost? The current answer seems inconsistent. In so far as arrangement signifies a picture, it is lost; science has to do with paint, not pictures. In so far as arrangement signifies organisation it is kept; science has much to do with organisation. Why should we (speaking now as philosophers, not scientists) make a discrimination between these two aspects of arrangement? The discrimination is made because the picture is no use to the scientist—he cannot get further with it. As impartial judges it is our duty to point out that likewise entropy is no use to the artist—he cannot develop his outlook with it. [Pg 107] I am not trying to argue that there is in the external world an objective entity which is the picture as distinct from the myriads of particles into which science has analysed it. I doubt if the statement has any meaning; nor, if it were true, would it particularly enhance my esteem of the picture. What I would say is this: There is a side of our personality which impels us to dwell on beauty and other aesthetic significances in Nature, and in the work of man, so that our environment means to us much that is not warranted by anything found in the scientific inventory of its structure. An overwhelming feeling tells us that this is right and indispensable to the purpose of our existence. But is it rational? How can reason regard it otherwise than as a perverse misrepresentation of what is after all only a collection of atoms, aether-waves and the like, going about their business? If the physicist as advocate for reason takes this line, just whisper to him the word Entropy.