The Law of Direction: A Natural-Philosophical Principle Governing Order and Disorder

This paper sets out the Law of Direction, a principle of natural philosophy reasoned from first principles: each attraction and repulsion, including the random, moves in the direction of greatest attraction and/or least repulsion. Treated this way, attraction and repulsion are the basic interactions of nature rather than metaphors. Order and disorder become two outcomes of one rule of movement. Spencer's line of least resistance and James's path of least resistance are primitive forerunners of the Law of Direction. Its relation to the Second Law of Thermodynamics is also addressed. The paper is drawn from Law 4 of The Mechanics of Mechanics (McCoy, 2026). The laws, definitions, examples, and arguments in this paper are the author's own and are taken from The Mechanics of Mechanics (v1.3) and the author's earlier drafts. This paper was assembled and edited with the assistance of an AI writing tool (Claude, by Anthropic) under the author's direction, for wording, structure, and the reference list, and was then revised by the author word by word and sentence by sentence, where it appeared necessary. The author is responsible for its content. Full book: https://ameliestudios.com/b/p3kWB More at https://naturalphysics.org