Conservation, Causality and Chaos

Harlan Gilbert

Published in The Golden Blade Nr. 55 (2003)

 To know infinitely much about infinitely little has a hollow ring. That the efforts
of science have often appeared to lead in this direction, seeking to know with astonishing
precision what is ultimately insignificant, has given rise to a rising indifference or even
antipathy to science (and frequently to scientists) as inhuman or inhumane influences on
or presences in world culture. Especially those who treasure and cultivate the human
being’s inner dignity and moral worth must bemusedly regard as barbarian an approach
to the world that focuses exclusively on outer appearances at the cost of all that has
higher meaning.
The scientist often appraises the humane philosopher with an equally critical eye,
however. To comprehend what is infinitely important infinitely vaguely also fails to
satisfy the human spirit; in the end, vast but empty or unclear ideas nourish us no more
than does soulless precision. Philosophy’s images tend to flounder as soon as we seek to
narrow their scope from the undifferentiated wholeness of the world to its particulars.
Faced with this, those who wish to do and not just to know, to work in and transform the
world and not just to ponder it, to comprehend the outer world’s rich detail with any
clarity, will inevitably turn to the analytic tools of science.
Conversely, however, science’s conventional tools fail as soon as their scope
would broaden or deepen; they cannot tell us what a chair, what carbon, what the
universe is, but only what these have as external characteristics (e.g. four legs, six protons
and numerous galaxies, respectively). Science’s focus on having rather than being is an
expression of – as well as one of the greatest powers acting to disseminate – the
materialistic character of our times. It takes the power of creative, not just abstract
thought to grasp the larger context and inner meaning of things.
In the end, both orientations of consciousness – attention to the inner, and clarity
as to the outer nature of things – lead back around to the other pole, as in the ancient
Taoist symbol:

Implicit in the outer manifestation is the inner nature; burgeoning in the inner nature is
the tendency to outer manifestation; and neither can reach a condition of completeness
without including the other.
A search for such a balance is manifesting powerfully inside of science today.
Few realize how deeply science is being called upon by the course of its own progress to
transform its once abstract-analytic stance. The development of our consciousness of the
outer world is making strides in every sense not only equalling, but also paralleling the
great strides made by our inner development over the last century. At the same time,
philosophy is working to build bridges reaching from the inner essence towards the outer
form and appearance of things. For philosophy to achieve clarity, and science depth, is
the great challenge of our new century and millennium.
Some of the ways in which science is already opening such windows to the light
of the new millennium will be presented in this essay: new ideas that are shaking and
replacing science’s central dogmas, and transforming our whole conception of the
physical world as a fixed and self-sufficient realm following abstractly determinable and
determinate laws.
 A. The Conservation of Matter and Energy

“Don’t you see: that which was seed will get green herb, and herb
will turn into ear and ear into bread. Bread will turn into nutrient liquid,
which produces blood; from blood semen, embryo, man, corpse, Earth,
rock and mineral, and thus matter will change its form ever and ever and
is capable of taking any natural form.”
Giordano Bruno

On the face of it, the proposition that matter is conserved is counter-intuitive. We

often see substances seemingly disappearing into or appearing out of nowhere: when salt
or sugar is stirred into liquid, candles or logs disappear into flame or a mighty tree grows
out of a modest amount of soil in a pot. Energy, similarly, seems to appear and disappear
at will: a few pieces of inert coal can generate a tremendous amount of heat; a falling
stone is obviously imbued with ever-increasing dynamic energy over the course of its fall
– an energy which abruptly vanishes with the stone’s impact on a solid surface. These
few examples could be multiplied ad infinitum.
It took careful research to show that matter can be transformed from one
condition into another (between solid, liquid and gaseous states or in various chemical
combinations), but not appear or disappear, and that there is a factor called mass, a
readily measurable quantity independent of matter’s form and environment, that remains
constant independently of any transformations that it undergoes. Similarly, careful
research revealed that energy, too, can appear in a variety of forms – e.g. heat, dynamic,
chemical and systemic1 energy – but that its total quantity remains constant, one form of
energy always being transformed into another, never being lost or created.
The conservation of matter and energy had hardly been established when an
exception became apparent. Substances such as radium and uranium were seen to
generate significant quantities of heat and other energies without an apparent source.
Careful measurement showed that the mass of these substances also gradually but
constantly decreases with time. A transformation of material substance into immaterial
energy was evidently taking place. It became clear that, under special circumstances,
matter can disappear as matter, reappearing however as energy in the process; it was later
discovered that energy seems to be able to disappear and reappear as matter, as well.
Matter and energy were found to be two complementary aspects of a single principle or
entity. Einstein demonstrated that the transformation linking the two states is governed by
a law of conversion, the famous energy equals mass times the speed of light squared (E =
m x c2), and that the total quantity of matter and energy is conserved even when the two
quantities are not separately conserved. This is a step towards monism; there are not,
separately, substance and activity; activity (or energy) and substance (or matter) are but
different ways in which the essential nature of the universe manifests itself. There are
those who would see consciousness and self as further aspects of this single essential
nature; all matter would then be imbued with an inherent potential for manifesting (or
1
What is generally called potential energy is actually the energy that arises from the arrangement of a
system of objects apart from the energies of the individual objects themselves (for example, the
gravitational potential of an object at a certain distance from the earth’s centre), and is thus more
appropriately named systemic energy.
manifesting as) activity, consciousness and/or self-awareness, as all self-awareness would
be imbued with an inherent potential for manifesting (or manifesting as, or manifesting
in) consciousness, activity or material substance.
In all of these cases – the conservation of matter, the conservation of energy and
the conservation of matter-energy – the term conservation is extremely misleading. What
really happens are transformations of matter or energy from one form to another;
transformations under the restriction of a conserved parameter (mass, energy or the
combined total). The physical world is much more in a constant state of transformation
than of conservation. This has become more evident through progress in understanding
the nature of matter, which was long considered to be composed of well-defined particles
or building-blocks (atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.) gathered together in a solar-
system like constellation with a central, massive core surrounded by smaller, whirling
‘planetary’ objects. It is no longer believed that either the atom or its constitutive
elements possess such a substantial and fixed nature. It is now considered that sub-atomic
‘particles’ are more accurately characterized as tendencies, impulses, orientations – or
even probabilities! – than objects; they exist as a range of possibilities, if at all; they are
seen to have a particular location and constitution through the act of observation itself.2
Matter is now seen as being in constant transformation at every level. Molecules,
elements and subatomic entities (particles) can be transformed almost at will – at least in
the laboratory, for we can accomplish many of these changes only under extremely
special conditions: high temperatures, pressures and energies. In the realm of molecular
substances, this is especially noticeable in the case of organic compounds. Even to
produce the simplest organic compound, carbon dioxide, through non-organic means –
for which a flame suffices – requires temperatures and energies far above that needed by
life; plants and cold blooded animals can generate carbon dioxide (and other, far more
complex organic compounds) at temperatures near the freezing point of water and with
minimal expenditure of energy. To produce in a laboratory more complex organic
compounds such as chlorophyll, haemoglobin, proteins or DNA would require a fantastic
array of equipment, extraordinary pressures, temperatures and energies and an inordinate
amount of time. Indeed, an ever-increasing range of complex organic compounds is being
successfully synthesized in laboratories in just this way.3 Living organisms accomplish
this feat on a molecule-by-molecule basis using extremely modest amounts of energy (a
little gentle sunlight suffices) and at pressures and temperatures that hardly deviate from
normal earthly conditions. Life achieves this by bringing structural influences to bear on
substances, bringing these into affinities that facilitate their being combined or split apart.
This structural manipulation is achieved through the mediation of special substances, e.g.
enzymes, each of which has the capacity to exert a formative influence to induce or
catalyze a particular reaction (or stage thereof) for a single molecule of substance. In
order to establish its physical basis, the living world thus achieves transformations of

2
It is for this reason that light behaves as a wave would when observed in a certain manner, and as a
particle would when observed in another manner; the manner of observation interacts with the indefinite
nature of elementary substance (such as light) to create the phenomenon observed.
3
One of the most interesting of such efforts is the attempt to simulation the physical conditions that might
have been present in the primeval earth before life began. Through the interaction of the intense energies
and simple chemical compounds that, it is postulated, were available in the early days of the earth’s
evolution, compounds quite similar to many of those that form the basic range made use of by living
organisms today have been successfully generated.
substance through structural metamorphoses. Life’s capacity to exert formative
influences on the physical world underlies all organic processes.
It is worthwhile building up a picture of the extent to which organic substances
are the results of structurally formative influences. The chlorophyll molecule, a
particularly symmetric but not especially complex example of an organic compound,
illustrates this:

(diagrams)

Kernel of the chlorophyll molecule Whole chlorophyll molecule

For a scientist to accomplish the transformation of elements requires special

physical conditions far more extreme than those required for the transformation of
molecular substances. These physical conditions are employed to generate structural
changes at a deeper level than that of the connections between substances involved in
chemical bonds: on the atomic or subatomic level. Given life’s innate capacity to exert
structural (and deep structural) influences on matter, and our present understanding of
atoms and subatomic particles as not being primarily material (i.e. innately stable,
inflexible objects) but rather essentially structural in nature, elements – and even
subatomic particles – could be directly subject to life’s influence. There have actually
been experiments, for example, which have measured a greater increase of the quantity of
certain minerals in plants than can be explained by their intake from their environment. It
is likely that life has a capacity to transform the very essence of substance: through its
capacity to exert a subtle structural/formative influence, to do what we can only do in the
laboratory under extremes of conditions. The conception of atoms and particles as fixed
and stable entities is now antiquated given life’s proven capacity to exert structurally
transformative influences on the material-substantial world.
Rudolf Steiner once gave a picture of ingested external substances being
completely broken down and then regenerated in the living organism. This seems at least
potentially to extend beyond chemical decomposition and the building of new organic
compounds; their may be a tendency for living organisms to dissolve and reconstitute the
very elements, perhaps even the very elements of the elements, atomic substance itself.
This formative, transformative capacity is being given new attention in the light
of certain new illnesses (BSE, CJE). These are actually new manifestations of an animal
malady that has been known for years: scrapie, an illness affecting Scottish sheep. It
appears that this degenerative condition is the result of certain organic proteins (called
prions) acquiring a modified structure. (Every protein has an extremely complex spatial
structure, being folded and crumpled in an incredibly convoluted manner.) In the
presence of particular new structural arrangements, other prions rearrange themselves
into the new form. The modified structural form thus spreads further and further through
the organism, wherever prions are to be found (these are generally localized in the
nervous system), or also through other organisms with similar protein structures.
Generally such transmission is restricted to those of the same species, though there is
some evidence that prions may themselves be capable of mutation, evolving into forms
that pose risks for other species (such as humans), as well.
 Matter and energy are in unceasing transformation. Both are far more mysterious,
far less clearly definable entities than the nineteenth century could have conceived:
structures of tendencies, processes of becoming whose countenance appears to us as
being. Life has a capacity to extend its formative powers into the realm, possibly into the
very being of substance and energy, themselves but two potential modes of manifestation
of a single essence that we might call physicality. That life and physical substance are
capable of being mysteriously united to work together in forms that are neither only the
one nor only the other, but something greater than either could be alone – in the plants,
the animals, the human being – rather than remaining forever separate qualities is the
miracle by which nature demonstrates this capacity.
 B. Causality

According to science’s conventional view, the physical world is ruled strictly by

the law of cause and effect. No kind of influences originating from outside the physical
world are allowed place in this conception, for if such influences occurred they would
contravene the physical world’s own laws: an effect would appear in the physical world
without a corresponding physical cause.
This isolation of the physical realm raises deep questions as to the nature of life,
sentience, self and the divine or spiritual realms. If cause and effect are truly absolute in
the physical realm, then the latter aspects of the world are either meaningless illusions,
phenomena brought forth purely as a result of physical reality which we merely
misinterpret when we believe that they exist independently of their physical
manifestation or attribute to them any significance beyond their physical expression; or
they are phenomena which truly exist independently of the physical realm but are
absolutely without any capacity to influence the course of events in the physical world.
Both of these explanations appear to be contravened by daily experience. Life,
sentience, self – and surely the spiritual realm as well, despite the latter’s lesser
accessibility to our everyday consciousness – seem to be quite obviously independent of,
that is, not determined by, physical reality, yet nevertheless very capable of influencing
physical processes: a plant grows, an animal moves and reacts to the world, the human
being executes free will in the physical world. Somehow, higher aspects of reality bridge
the gap between their own realm and physical existence.
Cracks in science’s model of strict physical causality actually began to appear
already early in the twentieth century. Heisenberg showed that our own determinations or
measurements of reality so affect that reality as to make those determinations inaccurate;
it is as if we measured the force of a boat’s progress by seeing how much effort we need
to exert to stop the boat. We can only know something about what is no longer the case;
we know what force the boat had, but the boat is no longer moving. More or less
simultaneously, Bohr showed that there are certain (‘quantum’) phenomena which
progress in an indeterminate and/or essentially unpredictable fashion. Not only is it an
open question which possibility of those available will arise – thus destroying the idea of
strict causality, where from any given starting situation a clear successor situation results,
and of the reversibility of time, where from any given situation a single preceding
situation can be determined; even whether such phenomena actually go in any of the
available directions (rather than all simultaneously or none at all) is an unanswerable,
irrelevant question except when a concrete observer is involved (and interfering with the
phenomena’s unfolding).
In such cases, the whole idea of causality is either undemonstrable or even
inapplicable. The bulwark of causality was shaken but did not collapse simply because
both Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics are only significant
factors on extremely small scales. So it was assumed, at least.
At the end of the century, it was then discovered that certain large-scale
phenomena are so sensitive to the conditions in which they take place that even the
slightest of alterations in these conditions completely transforms the further progress of
the phenomenon. Small and even infinitesimal causes can have determining effects on
large-scale events. The ‘gateways’ for such influences are turbulent or chaotic conditions
in the physical world. Studies by a variety of authors, especially those gathered under the
rubric of chaos theory, as well as recent work on the nature and origin of complexity by
Stephen Wolfram, show the astonishing extent of the complexity of the possible
evolutions of such phenomena, and the sensitivity of these evolutions to infinitesimal
changes in the conditions under which they take place.
Sensitive phenomena characteristically alter their behaviour across the whole
scope of their possible range in response to slight or even infinitesimal alterations in
conditions; a dry leaf falling in autumn will tumble differently and thus land in an
entirely different place depending on its exact crinkle and the slightest of air currents.
Traditional science would have refused to believe that such slight influences could result
in significant alterations of behaviour; after all, the overwhelming mass of the leaf
remains constant. Seemingly insignificant differences change a leaf’s tumble in a way
that grows extremely (i.e. exponentially) rapidly. As a result, the leaf ends up far
removed from where we might expect it to fall. Thus the great difficulty in catching
falling leaves; their behaviour from tumble to tumble simply defies predictability.
Whether leaves fall here or there may well seem to be a thing of little
consequence, though a surprising amount of life depends upon subtle things. Such
sensitive, complex patterns of development are characteristic of an extraordinary range of
phenomena, however: water and air turbulence, heart rhythms, the firing of neurone
synapses and cell division, to give just a few examples.4 Such phenomena are gateways
of freedom through which it is in principle possible for non-physical influences to work
to determine the physical world’s evolution without contravening the physical law of
cause and effect. The latter is not so much negated as that it becomes irrelevant in this
realm; the actual evolution of such phenomena is effectively independent of strict
causality, lying in the realm of unpredictability.
Let us look more closely at a quite different example of a sensitive phenomenon.
The processes underlying cell division and conception were once conceived of as being
quite straightforward: During cell division, each of the various pairs of chromosomes was
thought to separate into its two halves, one complete set of the single chromosomes so
obtained then going to each daughter cell. During conception, it was thought, the egg and
sperm each contribute their set of these single chromosomes to form the new paired set
that would form the child’s genetic inheritance.
Through wonderfully detailed images of these process, we now know that the
process is much more complicated than this. The two halves of a chromosome pair freely
exchange component genes as they separate off from one another, resulting in new, never
before existing combinations of genes drawn from the parent chromosomes. The new
chromosomes of the daughter cells thus often contain genes drawn from both sides of the
mother cell’s chromosome pairs, freely selected and ordered in a transformed sequence.
Not only that: during cell division genes can even cross over from one kind of
chromosome pair to another, wholly distinct kind.
A similar process occurs at conception, when single sets of chromosomes from
the gametes (e.g. sperm and egg, or pollen and ovule) unite; the resulting pairs are not

4
It has been shown that precisely regular heartbeats or patterns of neuron firing are signs of approaching
organ crisis or of an organism’s death. In both cases, the healthy pattern is a slightly turbulent – and thus
sensitive – one.
merely the result of the straightforward bonding of the two inherited chromosomes, as
was once thought, but are actually newly created combinations drawn from the genetic
material made available by the parent cells. Genetic inheritance is created through such a
free and unpredictable transformation that at the first moment of its creation the zygote
could be said to go through a phase of near total dissolution or chaos. What arises after
this must indeed be drawn from the available genetic factors (unless these are also
capable of being transformed; we do not yet have precise enough images of the process to
determine whether this is the case or not); how the new arrangement arises is not
determined by the genetic inheritance. The latter determines which substances (genes) are
available, but not the process of putting these together and thus not the resulting
arrangement. Here, too, cause and effect seem to disappear here and freedom – or
sensitivity to influences from realms higher than the observable, physical reality – reign.
Such sensitively free moments – moments when a phenomenon’s evolution is not
strictly determinable by even the most precise knowledge of its past course and its
environmental conditions – are as influential in the actual development of the world as
cause and effect. Under strictly controlled laboratory conditions, we can establish
situations where cause and effect appears to rule exclusively. Under the complex
conditions that exist in reality, sensitivity and unpredictability reign far more often. There
are actually clear principles that determine whether a given phenomenon unfolds
statically, rhythmically or sensitively, though many phenomena can unfold in any of
these ways depending upon the momentary situation. Classical cause and effect
relationships only hold true for static phenomena. Sensitive phenomena must be regarded
as unfolding largely independently of predictable, causal relationships. Rhythmic
phenomena hold a balance between the influence of causality and the unpredictability
introduced by sensitive phenomena.5

5
See my article Chaos, Rhythm and Stasis (in The Golden Blade 2002) for a much more extensive
exposition devoted to this theme.
 C. Chance

A third of science’s ‘central dogmas’ is that the world constantly tends towards
ever more disorder, towards an ever more random arrangement.6 This is another counter-
intuitive principle, for we often see nature establish ordered conditions out of relative
disorder: waves wash onto the scattered sand and produce wonderfully rhythmically
patterned crests and dips; out of tiny seeds dropped in dirt and rain, highly complex,
beautifully arranged plants grow; bees build thousands of hexagonally arranged cells out
of formless wax; man creates cathedrals out of shapeless rock and symphonies out of
chaotic tones. It seems to be apparent that order arises in the world just as well as
disorder; in fact, that there is a play between these two polar principles, every order
decaying into disorder, every disorder being raised up into a new order again.
William Thompson (Lord Kelvin)’s fundamental work on energy and heat
transfer, a subject now called thermodynamics, showed that all increases in physical
order depend ultimately upon a sacrifice of an equal or larger order elsewhere, so that the
total disorder of the universe (or any part of the world independent of energy exchanges
with its environment) constantly grows. Any increase in local order thus depends
physically upon a greater loss of order elsewhere: Waves give up more of their ordered,
rhythmic energy than they provide ordered form in the sand; bees must reduce pollen’s
complex sugars (themselves built up at the cost of sunlight’s concentrated light and
warmth) in order to establish the waxy, hexagonal cells of their hives.
Increasing disorder, entropy, could also be considered as a progressive loss of
potential for further development. By the nature of existence in time, everything in the
world (at least, everything subject to time’s course) begins its existence with its
maximum potential for development; as this potential is fulfilled it is naturally used up.
This is obvious; all that is possible later must have already been latent as future potential
earlier in a being’s existence. Entropy is thus merely the physical expression of this
obvious fact, that all future developments must exist as latent potential in the universe’s
(or any other entity’s) being. If there is no source of renewal of this potential, it must
steadily decrease. Any finite quantity (note the assumption that the universe began with a
finite quantity of order) that steadily decreases will ultimately approach a minimum level.
Science thus predicts that the world will eventually arrive at a condition wherein no more
potential for further development remains, all matter and energy being evenly distributed
in a uniform, ‘lukewarm’ soup. In a world empty of all physical distinctions, there can be
nothing to induce further alteration.
The purely physical world does indeed appear to continually increase its entropy
by sacrificing greater orders for lesser. Is this so clear where there is a non-physical
influence, however: where life, consciousness or self-awareness are present and play an
active role? It is at least fair to say that the oak tree, the bee and the violinist certainly
create far more order than would exist if the sun shone on barren rock, the flower’s pollen
dropped unnoticed, or the relevant musical instruments remained in their cases unplayed.
Relatively speaking, life, sentience and self-awareness are at least extremely effective

6
This is generally expressed in terms of a quantity called entropy, which is the measure of the disorder of a
system. It has been shown that no closed (i.e. isolated) physical system may ever increase its total order, i.e.
that entropy (disorder) can never decrease.
creators of certain kinds of order, and in this sense to be extremely effective opponents or
resisters of entropy; in fact, virtually all earthly order that we can discover, from veins of
iron ore to the sunflower’s wondrous head, stemmed originally from the activity of
living, sentient and/or self-aware beings. Nevertheless, science has always claimed, so
long as these factors operate in the physical realm, they cannot abrogate the physical law
of increasing entropy: Disorder will inevitably increase as the world heads towards a state
of universal equilibrium, of total undifferentiation.7
In the latter part of the twentieth century, an eclectic mathematician named
Mandelbrot discovered a principle which transforms our whole conception of the nature
of order. He showed that order can exist on many levels simultaneously, leading to a far
greater complexity and richness than is immediately apparent. In the case of a tree, for
example, or our network of blood vessels, there are primary branches (e.g. the trunk or
aorta) which constitute the main structure. These then diverge into smaller branches,
which diverge further into yet smaller branches until at last the smallest branchings of the
main network diverge into yet finer organs (leaves or capillaries) extending into a further
range of ever-smaller branchings (leaf veins or fine capillaries), and so on; no end can be
found to the ever-finer network (which at a certain point is differentiated into structural
flow tendencies rather than actual boundaried vessels). Analogous structures whose
complexity is equal to the complexity of the whole structure can be discovered at any
scale of such phenomena. These kind of structures are said to be ‘self-similar’ and to
possess a ‘fractal order’ because parts or fractions can be found which are similar to the
whole.
This kind of structure has some surprising results. Measurements of the total
length of a tree’s branchings or of our blood vessels, for example, vary widely with the
scale used in measuring. If only the chief branches are taken into account, a certain value
is found; including each stage of successively finer vessels or branches results in the total
measurement growing significantly by a multiple of the previous, rougher estimation.
This process never nears or reaches a progressive or ultimate limit; every increase of
scale produces a great extension of the measurable length.
It is as if a globe, country map, local map, surveyor’s wheel, snail’s path and
grain-by-grain count were used successively to measure the total length of a coastline.
Because of the infinitely variegated nature of such a boundary, as the scale of
measurement decreases, more complex details, resulting in radically increasing
measurements of the total length, are revealed.8 This is why it is difficult, faced with an
unidentified and unfamiliar fragment of a map, to identify its scale; there is an analogous
structure and complexity at every level. A coastline can be said to be arbitrarily, or even
infinitely large, depending upon the manner of its measurement.
Order is thus not merely linearly quantitative in nature; it has dimension and
depth, as well. Thermodynamics concerns itself with only one aspect of the world’s
order, that reflected in and manifesting its energy distribution. In deeply ordered systems,
7
It must be said that, through their capacity to accelerate the rate of chemical combination, all forms of life
are considered by classical science to increase physical entropy faster than what would happen in the same
environment if they were absent; this is a very condition of their existence.
8
There are constructions to demonstrate this effect; one of the simplest is the following. Take an equilateral
triangle and place small equilateral triangles, each one-third as large as the original triangle, centred on all
of its sides. To each protruding triangle side of the resulting figure, add triangles one-third the size of the
last ones added. Continue ad infinitum.
including fractal ones, a finitely entropical energy distribution may possess a
disproportionately great subtle or deep order, perceptible in the qualitative character it
engenders (let us say, in a feather) and manifesting through layers of successively more
finely inlayed order.
Is it possible for a deeply ordered system to generate net thermodynamic order?
Or is its order present in some other way?
At the level of the structural-formative influences of living being, the diminishing
scale of successive layers of order − of, say, the branches of a tree or the venus-arterial
system − is by definition greater than the increasing quantity of branches. Were this not
so, an infinite mass and volume of substance would be involved. Because the physical
quantity of ordered substance remains finitely bounded, there is also a finite limit to the
entropic consequences of the fine order here. While it can order substances at fine levels
hitherto unimaginable, and thus give new structure to the earth (visible in the humus layer
with its remarkable harmonizing qualities and affinity for taking water up into its deep
structure, but also in its capacity to hold and make available to plants the minerals needed
for their growth), living substance can thus not breach physical entropy.
A new element arises through animal consciousness, which infuses physical
substance with a new quality of sensitivity to the cosmic and airy realms. This becomes
apparent in soil that has been either worked by earthworms or properly manured; indeed,
even where leguminous plants – which also have the capacity to take up and fix airy
substance into the soil, and which have a certain animal-sentient character9 – have been
grown.
In addition, the cry of an animal − the warning cry of a seagull or a jackall’s
hunting cry − may result in an ordering of behaviour disproportionate to the energy
involved in the cry: the whole flock or pack may wheel about, fall into formation, etc.
Still, animals must employ physical reactions to obtain social order, and their activity
thus remains subject to thermodynamic laws, being fully expressed in the physical realm.
Non-physical order manifests for the first time at the level of human creativity.
The contribution of the human being is to infuse substances with a higher, an inner motif
or order. Artistically treated substance bears a quality of order and even inner warmth
that enters into the physical matter itself. A symphony, both in its creation and in its
performance, contains order beyond that contained in the physical substance of ink on
paper or tones in space. The harmonics of a symphony play themselves out over the
course of the whole piece, in each individual movement, in each section, in each phrase,
in each bar, in each moment (between the tones), between the individual instruments,
within the tone produced by a given instrument, in the vibrating parts of the instrument or
the room, in the very structure of these materials10, and so on.
There is an implicit order, a dimension of order beyond the physical domain,
inherent in and potentially accessible through all human creativity and communication.
This is also true of the human body and the substances it bears and then sheds – though
less so of human faeces, which is what passes through without having actually been taken

9
Leguminous plants are typically capable of a certain degree of movement and sensitive response to the
environment (as seen e.g. in the climbing tendrils of peas and beans), have a tendency towards forming
inner, air-bearing organs (e.g. the pods) and have a strong relationship to nitrogen, otherwise typical of the
animal world.
10
A violin’s tone thus improves by being played upon over many years and not with age alone.
up into the realm of the human being’s creative activity. Human remains have thus
always been considered holy in nature; they are infused with a higher order, having borne
and been transformed by an ego presence.
Such humanly generated increases in order are essentially non-thermodynamic in
nature. There is not an increased potential for generating physical energy in the motif-
bearing substance of the human organism or in a musical composition; nonetheless, an
enhanced state of order has been established therein. Thermodynamic order, which
represents the potential for world-evolution in a physical sense; is thus progressively
transformed into inner order, which could also be called informational order, in the sense
of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who spoke of the inward direction of the world, its
‘inscape’, as opposed to its outer revelation or countenance.
This level of order defies entropic limits, being outside the limits of
thermodynamics’ domain.
Thus we see that the organic life of the plant world brings structure and harmony
into physical-material substance, the sentient existence of the animal world makes it
sensitive and the human being infuses it with order. These qualities are brought about in
the outer physical material, in matter itself, however. This matter eventually returns to the
larger physical world through processes of decay, etc. The qualities it bears is not – or at
least not immediately – lost when the outer form decays. This provides a path to the
transformation of the very ground of the physical world’s being; its matter is
progressively taken up, harmonized, made sensitive, permeated with a higher order, and
returned to it.
The whole earth is thus being transformed into a bearer of a higher order,
informed with structure, sensitivity and motif. Through human existence in particular,
beyond its purely material existence, the earth is receiving an identity as the bearer of a
higher order – an inscape.
 Conclusion

The once scientifically accepted and justified view of the world being ruled by
conservation, causality and chance is being replaced by a comprehension of a world of
metamorphosis, sensitivity and motif or inner order. These latter elements indeed
originate from and are borne down from higher realms than the physical, but take hold of
and transform the physical realm into an expression of their qualities. Our naïve sense of
the world as one involved in constant transformation, infused with sensitivity and imbued
with order is no illusion. It is a true picture of a level of reality accessible to immediate
experience but hitherto resistant to analytic description; a level of reality now gradually
being recognized and accessible to such description as science progresses beyond its
early, in their own right equally naïve conceptions of the world.