Animate and the Inanimate
Author: first_name: William James
last_name: Sidis
Language: English
Year: 1925

Sidis wrote <i>The Animate and the Inanimate</i> to elaborate his thoughts on the origin of life, cosmology, and the potential reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics through Maxwell's Demon, among other things. It was published in 1925, but it has been suggested that Sidis was working on the theory as early as 1916. One motivation for the theory appears to be to explain psychologist and philosopher William James's "reserve energy" theory, which proposed that people subjected to extrem