PROFESSOR AT KONIGSBERG 99 



lecture, he gathers up all these propositions in a form that 

 anticipates his later conclusions: 



' Sensations of light and colour are only symbols for relations 

 of reality. They have as much and as little connexion or 

 relation with it, as the name of a man, or the letters of his 

 name, have to do with the man himself. They inform us 

 by the equality or inequality of their appearance whether 

 we are dealing with the same, or with different, objects and 

 properties of objects . . . beyond this they tell us nothing. As 

 to the real nature of the external phenomena to which we 

 refer them, we learn nothing, as little as we know of a man 

 from his name/ 



This lecture again attracted the attention of the philosophers 

 to his views on physics and physiology, without, however, 

 gaining their approval. 



As soon as Helmholtz had finished his Inaugural Thesis 

 he proceeded to develop the theorem of current distribution, 

 previously communicated to du Bois-Reymond, of the impor- 

 tance of which he was well aware. At the end of April he 

 writes to Ludwig : ' I had the luck to discover a mathematical 

 theorem as to the distribution of current in bodies, which gave 

 du Bois so much trouble ; this greatly simplifies the matter, 

 but involves a few minor alterations in the hypotheses he 

 suggested/ In the middle of July, 1852, he sends du Bois 

 a note for the Academy, entitled, 'A Theorem of the Distribu- 

 tion of Electrical Currents in Material Conductors/ while at 

 the beginning of the following year, 1853, he sent the full 

 exposition of the subject, ' Upon Certain Laws of the Distri- 

 bution of Electrical Currents in Material Conductors, with 

 Application to Experiments in Animal Electricity/ to Poggen- 

 dorff for his journal. In this work Helmholtz for the first 

 time enters the field of mathematical physics and physiology, 

 with the full equipment of the higher mathematical analysis, 

 of which he was the only master in its application to the latter 

 science. Even here, and much more in his later works, we 

 feel that, as he himself insists, his juvenile penchant for 

 geometry had developed into a kind of special mechanical sense, 

 'by means of which I almost feel how the stress and strain 

 are distributed in a mechanical contrivance ': while, on the other 

 hand, it is plain that he strives to make complex and important 



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