mass-motion product and the duration factor as the period of time through which the action at the given rate continues, both of which are variable — dependent variables — their product being a constant number of life-years.

 

 If, for example, the average mass should be taken as 150 pounds and the average velocity of all its movements as the equivalent of ten feet per minute for this mass (meaning this amount of gravita­tional or similar force), then the power rate would be 1,500 pounds-feet per minute or about .045 horsepower. At this rate the energy per life-year would be about 390 horsepower-hours. Assuming the life span to be twenty-five years, then the energy per individual would be twenty-five life-years or some 10,000 horsepower-hours, and the energy of a generation of a million persons so averaging would be twenty-five million life-years or about ten billion horse­power-hours. If however, this flow of energy can be transformed so that the average life span rises to fifty years, then it will require only a half-million persons to constitute the same amount of energy in an equal twenty-five million life-years. Such a transformation of population energy would give it a vastly higher functional capacity, as will be shown in Chapter 7.

 

 It is, of course, not stated nor is it to be implied that the energy transformations characteristic of any life-form are expressed only in its gross-bodily movements; but, however complex they may be, they must all take some form or forms of energy transfer the total of which would be equivalent to some certain amount of motion of its mass — a certain amount of energy-in-action manifested simply as a given mass, motion and duration. This energy, in whatever com­plex forms it may be manifested, must have an average value for the individuals of any population. Without necessarily knowing what this average value is, we may take it as holding constant at unity throughout various changes in the one definitely ascertainable variable factor, namely, the average duration of the lives. By such changes the energy may be profoundly transformed without any change necessarily being made in its rate or total amount per genera­tion. The rate of energy manifestation per average individual is taken as constant not only because that must be substantially true, but also in order to examine in isolation the effects due solely to changes in the average life span and not to any other cause or change.

The association of interfunctioning men that constitutes the social organism is being described as an organization of energy. The energy flows into it from its environment and flows back again. As to the members that constitute its structure, it is a discontinuous flow marked by the succession of their individual lives. Its own continuity results from the overlapping of the periods of the many individual lives. The longer these lives endure, the less frequent their discon­tinuities, the more they can interfunction without replacement — then the longer the duration of the total organization that they com­pose.

 

 Each continuity between discontinuities is a span of individual life or of a generation. Each life that comes to maturity is an integration of energy into its completed structure, a return of further energy to environment in functioning upon it, and a final dis-integration of the structure back into the elements of environment whence it came.

 

 Just as the structure of the social organization is an integration of its component parts, so is the functioning of the social organism in the rebuilding of its world the statistical integration of the functional energy that through its individual members flows. This is the creative process and power of mankind that they do not as separate individuals possess, that comes to them only through their incorporation into the social organism and their interfunctioning therein.

 

 Each generation of the population may be treated as an energy wave or a composite train of waves composed of the lesser waves or wave-trains of its individual lives, these having unequal energy but nonetheless having an average magnitude, just as there is an average energy magnitude for the variant wave-train successions of which the sun’s radiant energy is composed.

 

 The quantity of energy manifested per average unit in the or­ganized population is its average number of life-years. The amount of energy that a population draws from its environment, transforms and returns to it in the period of each of its successive generations as energy waves, or as organizations of energy waves, is proportionate to its total number of life-years during that period. It may be ex­pressed as the mean number of its units during that period times their mean duration, or N x D. The structural magnitude and the po­tential (the mass and the motion) of each generation of population as a wave or composition of energy waves, then, is expressed by its number of units N; its duration is D; and its frequency is, of course, the reciprocal of its duration, 1/D.

 

 It is thus apparent that a stream of population energy treated as a succession of organized energy waves is susceptible of important transformations through alterations in the period or frequency of its successively generated organizations of waves. And these transfor­mations are not necessarily accompanied by nor do they depend upon any change being made in the total quantity of population energy (as action) that constitutes the composite waves. Any change of frequency or of duration is therefore, of necessity, a qualitative change — positively or negatively qualitative, depending on whether the change is in the direction of lower or higher frequency of dis­continuity — a longer or shorter average life span.

 

 The duration of the individual lives in a population is obviously dependent upon the kind of relationships that the members practice towards one another — upon the changes (improvement or deterioration) in the subsistence and other conditions of living that these re­lationships create. The interrelations of its members within a society are either free or coercive relationships, either social or contra-social. They are either creative exchanges of services in free relationships or they are rude degradations of the social energy through unfree re­lationships involving duress, coercion or force. Accordingly, their result is either creation or destruction, either an improvement or a degradation of the environmental world. This either extends the duration or raises the frequency of human lives by lengthening or shortening their average span.

 

 It is the possibility of discovering just what are these creative re­lationships and of rationally extending them, particularly into the public affairs and services of common use and participation, that affords the field for conscious and rational applications of this new natural science of society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 4

Qualitative Changes in Population Energy

Regarding population, then, as energy basically one and identical with the universal energy, and having similar modes of transforma­tion, we will examine first some of the more simple and familiar manifestations of energy with respect to the qualitative changes that can take place in them. This may well disclose what kind of trans­formations in the life-years of a population are to be desired, and thus point towards a basic rational technique for a practical science of society consciously applied.

 

 Radiant energy from the sun, raising vapor from the seas and lands, mantles mountain peaks in crystal splendors that melt away in limpid lakes and racing streams. Through one of these a million cubic feet of water daily flows. When these million feet move in great mass or volume, as through a lake, then each moves with but little power or speed. If they move without succession and in one array, then each will move but a single foot per day. But let their order among them­selves be so rearranged that they pass in single file, then each will move with a speed of a million feet a day.

 

 Thus can enormous change take place in the manner, in the qualitative power and effect, without any change in the quantity or the rate of flow. The total quantity of flow through any period of time is the product of any volume or mass times its velocity times the duration of the flow, unchanged by any manner or proportion in which the mass and its motion may be combined. So there be no change in the element of time — in the duration factor — the mass and motion factors may be transformed and recombined in any form or ratio, and with highly variant effects, and yet the total flow remain in quantity unchanged.

 

 An energy stream of many units having low charge or motion is subdued to its surroundings, controlled by them; an altered flow, in quantity the same, but having fewer units at higher velocity or charge, is adapted to give off energy effectively and thereby impress environment with change. The one is supine to externals, tool or pawn of circumstance; the other impinges on its surroundings and thus, in measure, creates and determines the character of its external world. The low-potential electric charge is balked by resistance, flows only where resistance is low; the high-potential current over­comes resistance and maintains its way. The stream whose units are many, and their potentials low, flows as its surroundings prescribe; its course is determined. The swift stream of few units, but with potentials high, carves its own.

 

 Physical energy, without known organic processes and repetitions, does not have (except in its radiant forms) any ascertained rhythms of integration and disintegration in successive generations, such as the organic or biologic energy of a population does. Hence while it is the object of men to accelerate those changes in environment that are favorable to them, they, at the same time, desire to retard the rhythm of their own reproduction. With respect to environment, they desire to change the mass-motion ratios of the energy, not the duration of its flow. But with respect to the energy that is organized in and flowing through the generations of men, what they desire is not, primarily at least, any change in the average mass-motion ratio but in the durational factor itself.

 

 Men sense their own lives as fleeting. But they have no occasion or desire to extend the durational factor in the processes of their natural and environmental world. So the human objective is not only to transform the energies of environment in ways that main­tain and lengthen lives, but to effect these creative changes in the briefest time — maximum achievement within the human life span. Accordingly, all human ratings of efficiency in the transformations of energy are based on equal quantities of time.[5]

 

 Considering the energy stream that manifests itself in the successive generations that constitute a societal life-stream, we find that a mass population of brief and therefore low-energy individual lives must yield and conform to whatever tyrannies are imposed upon it either by nature or by man. However high in activity or potential the individual lives may be, without length of days their creative power is small. Their energy is aborted; it does not continue flowing cre­atively into the environing world. Without dominion over environ­ment, they cannot inherit the earth and must remain themselves supine and subdued.

 

 But the population whose energy manifests itself in longer lives of its individuals has thus far higher possibilities. Though its numbers be far less (and its life-years per generation no more) than those of a short-lived population, it is nonetheless far superior in its power to create — to act and not be acted upon. Without any quantitative superiority in life-years, there is still a quantitative superiority, a fundamentally significant distinction; for the merely quantitative, as such has no power to create — or to destroy.

 

 In any organization of energy, quality, as distinguished from quantity, is the power to create or to destroy, to integrate or disin­tegrate, organize or disorganize. In its positive aspect, it is facility to do, in the Latin sense of facere, to make or create. Energy, as an or­ganized stream, is positively qualitative in proportion to its dura­tional content, its length of days. This it gains only from the dura­tional content or time-potential of the energy units that constitute the organization or stream. The longer their lives the more potent the stream. The degree of immortality of a population — infrequency of its deaths and renewals, length of its periodic waves, its members’ life span — is the measure of its creative power over its environing world.

 

 In the preceding Chapter, the variability over periods of time of the average life span, the transition of a population from the one to the other form of energy organization — the transformation of the current, so to speak — was assumed. This is supported by the fact that such transformations have taken place during periods of societal growth and of societal decay. Even in the shorter phases of “bad times” and “good times” the mortality rate rises and falls. A striking example was the extension of life during the nineteenth century in the Western world. A rational technology for this positive transfor­mation of population energy is indicated further on. It is sufficient here to say that the lengthening of the average span follows upon the expansion of free contractual relations — upon the advancement of freedom to produce, and, above all, of freedom to serve by self-sustaining exchange.

 

 The emergence of a high qualitative power in ordinary physical energy, when suitably transformed, and the discovery that there is a corresponding transformation of human and social energy, resolves the problem that through the ages has baffled the imagination and the contemplative mind of man. It reveals the linkage between the physical and the meta-physical, the long-doubted essential unity be­tween natural science and human destiny and hope. Magnitudes and ratios support the intuitions of philosophy and art, and the intel­lections of science are brought to serve transcendent dreams where mystery and miracle and resort to force alike have failed.

 

 Discovery of this qualitative property, this creative potential in any manifestation of energy, by the mere transformation and higher organization of its own internal structure, independently of any over-all quantitative change, makes clear and firm the long-time shadowy void between the quantitative and the qualitative worlds. In the simple process of transforming population energy by reducing the frequency of its discontinuities and so raising its duration, or time factor, its qualitative, its creative aspect is revealed. In the trans­formation of energy by rearrangement of its three elementary com­ponents, mass, motion and duration, in their merely quantitative interior proportions, but with qualitative exterior effects, it becomes the part of purely physical science to disclose, objectively, the qualitative and creative aspects of nature, including man, that re­ligion and philosophy so anciently pre-empted and have so long claimed as exclusively their own. To its grave and reverend elders, physical science proffers rational and practical techniques for effective realizations, in the objective world, of their subjective values and elusive ideals. Its fundamentals are set to serve both saint and singer, sage and seer; its humble modes of seeking and its sure results invite the hearts and minds that under none but moral motivation have yet not foregone force nor disdained dependence on the dungeon and the sword.

 

 By this venture into long forbidden land, science widens its own horizons to glimpse the upward way its mighty engineries must lead if they be not self-destroyed. And the votaries of science, as they ex­tend the spectrum of their quantitative world, must find themselves, all unwittingly, children of the same light, seekers, in their practical and precise ways, of the same Beauty that inspires creative art and ideal philosophy and binds the hearts of men to its divine devotion.