“The ‘second law’ is wholly irrelevant to ‘history’—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before the terminus.”

“Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get vibrating through and through with intensely active life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare, – why the sudden bloom of a Greece [Aristotle], an early Rome [Cicero], a Renaissance [Goethe], is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the nation glows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away.

We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why great rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great public fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses who in more torpid times would have had no chance to work. But over and above this there must be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is far greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always wear.”

“But what on earth is ‘social force’? Sometimes he identifies it with ‘social activity’ (showing the latter to be proportionate to the amount of food eaten), and sometimes with the work done by human beings and their steam-engines, and shows it to be due ultimately to the sun’s heat. It would never occur to a reader of this pages that a social force proper might be anything that acted as a stimulus of social change,—a leader, for example, a discovery, a book, a new idea, or a national insult; and that the greatest of ‘forces’ of this kind need embody no more ‘physical force’ than the smallest. The measure of greatness here is the effect produced on the environment, not a quantity antecedently absorbed from physical nature. Mr. Spencer himself is a great social force; but he ate no more than the average man, and his body, if cremated, would disengage no more energy.”

“To tell you the truth it doesn’t impress me at all, save by its wit and erudition, and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. No, sir, you can’t do it, — can’t impress God in that way.”

“It main be admitted that your Creator (and mine) started the universe with a certain amount of ‘energy’ latent in it, and decreed that everything that should happen thereafter should be a result of parts of that energy falling to lower levels; raising other parts higher, to be sure, in so doing, but never in equivalent amount, owing to the constant radiation of unrecoverable warmth incidental to the process.”

“I protest against your interpretation of some of the specification of the great statistical drift downwards of the original high-level energy … [history is] the course of things before that terminus.”

“Physically a dinosaur’s brain may show as much intensity of energy-exchange as a man’s, but it can do infinitely fewer things, because as a force of detent it can only unlock the dinosaur’s muscles, while the man’s brain, by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres Cathedral etc. and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into channels which never would have been entered otherwise—in short make history. Therefore the man’s brain and muscles are form the point of view of the historian, the more important place of energy-exchange, small as this may be, when measured in absolute physical units.”

“What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates.”

See main: Reserve energy

“Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.”

— William James (1890), Principles of Psychology [8]

“Ideas, whether for arousing or for stopping belief, may fail to be efficacious, just as a wire at one time alive with electricity, may at another time be dead.”

— William James (1907), “Energies of Men”

“Conversions, whether they be political, scientific, philosophic, or religious, form another way in which ‘bound energies’ are let loose. They unify, and put a stop to ancient mental interferences. The result is freedom, and often a great enlargement of power. A belief that thus settles upon an individual always acts as a challenge to his will. Whatever it is, it may be a highwater mark of energy, in which ‘noes’, once impossible, are easy, and in which a new range of ‘yeses’ gain the right of way.”

— William James (1907), “Energies of Men”

“The terms have to remain vague; for though every man of woman born knows what is meant by such phrases as having a good vital tone, a high tide of spirits, an elastic temper, as living energetically, working easily, deciding firmly, and the like, we should all be put to our trumps if asked to explain in terms of scientific psychology just what such expressions mean. We can draw some child-like psychophysical diagrams, and that is all. In physics the conception of ‘energy’ is perfectly defined. It is correlated with the conception of ‘work’. But mental work and moral work, although we cannot live without talking about them, are terms as yet hardly analyzed, and doubtless mean several heterogeneous elementary things. Our muscular work ire a voluminous physical quantity, but our ideas and volitions are minute forces of release, and by ‘work’ here we mean the substitution of higher kinds for lower kinds of detent.”

— William James (1907), “Energies of Men”