And as for your train of mechanical causation, Matthews, when you come down to it, it resolves itself into a series of purely fortuitous movements of something we can’t define in a medium that doesn’t exist. Even your heredity-business is fortuitous. Why one set of chromosomes more than any other? Your chain of causation would only be a real one if all possible combinations and permutations were worked out in practice. Something is going on, that is as certain as anything can be—that is, I mean, it is the fundamental assumption we are bound to make in order to reason at all—but how it started or why it started is just as mysterious as it was when the first thoughtful savage invented a god to explain it.”
“Why should it ever have started at all?” said Matthews. “As Matter passes from one form to another, so forces change from one to another. Why should we suppose a beginning—or an end if it comes to that? Why not a perpetually shifting kaleidoscope, going through all its transformations and starting again?”
“Why, my lad,” replied Hoskyns, “because in that case you will come slap up against the second law of thermodynamics, and that will be the end of you.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Perry, “the formula that starts so charmingly about ‘Nothing in the statistics of an assemblage’—that appears to be all the Law and the Prophets nowadays.”
“Yes,” said Hoskyns. “Its general meaning is that Time only works in one direction, and that when all the permutations and combinations have been run through, Time will stop, because there will be nothing further by which we can distinguish its direction. All the possibilities will have been worked out, all the electrons will have been annihilated, and there will be nothing more for them to do and no radiant energy left for them to do it with. That is why there must be an end. And if an end, presumably a beginning.”