The Commens Dictionary

Quote from ‘Cambridge Lectures on Reasoning and the Logic of Things: Habit’

Those non-conservative actions which seem to violate the law of energy, and which physics explains away as due to chance-action among trillions of molecules, are one and all marked by two characters. The first is that they act in one determinate direction and tend asymptotically toward bringing about an ultimate state of things. If teleological is too strong a word to apply to them, we might invent the word finious, to express their tendency toward a final state. The other character of non-conservative actions is that they are irreversible.