Sidis wrote The Animate and the Inanimate to detail his thoughts on the origins of life, cosmology, and the potential reversibility of the second law through Maxwell's Demon, among other things. It was published in 1925; however, it has been suggested that Sidis was working on the theory as early as 1916. One motivation for writing this theory appears to be to explain psychologist and philosopher William James's "reserve energy" theory which claimed that there was "reserve energy" that could be used by people when put under extreme conditions, Sidis' own "forced prodigy" upbringing being a result of testing said theory. The work is one of the few works that Sidis did not write under a pseudonym.