Science Quote by Oliver Joseph Lodge

Lodge is trying to smuggle agency back into a universe newly enchanted by thermodynamics. By conceding up front that life is neither "energy" nor "matter", he signals allegiance to mainstream physics; he won’t be caught preaching crude vitalism. Then he pivots: life "directs" energy. That verb is the whole game. Energy is conserved, yes, but its pathways aren’t inevitable. A steam engine and a bomb obey the same accounting, yet one powers a city while the other levels it. Lodge is carving out a conceptual loophole: even if life doesn’t add to the ledger of physics, it can still be the accountant who decides where the money goes.

The subtext is late-Victorian anxiety dressed as scientific restraint. By 1900, physics had made matter and energy feel like the only serious currencies, while Darwinism made purpose look like a sentimental add-on. Lodge, a physicist with a strong investment in psychical research and a more porous boundary between science and metaphysics than today’s gatekeepers allow, wants "control" without violating conservation laws. He’s offering a respectable vocabulary for saying: mind matters.

Context matters too: this is the era when "information" and "organization" didn’t yet have the formal status they would later gain in biology and computing. Lodge’s intuition anticipates a modern distinction between raw power and patterning - not life as a substance, but life as a coordinating principle. It’s persuasive because it flatters physics while refusing its reductionist swagger, insisting that arrangement is not an afterthought but the stage where meaning and consequence actually happen.