  The notion of inflation (past or present) in standard cosmological models is
shown to be a consequence of a sufficiently high second law entropy production
from the internal heating of the universal expansion. The longitudinal viscous
internal heating of matter requires neither ``inflaton'' fields nor
``quintessence'' fields which in theory may induce a cosmological term into the
Einstein equations. The purely thermodynamic principles required to understand
inflation within the context of the standard general relativity equations will
be discussed in detail.
