CORRESP ONDENCE. 



121 



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PROFESSOR OSTWALD ON THE 

 MECHANICAL THEORY. 



Editor Popular Science Monthly : 



SIR : In the last number of your valuable 

 publication appeared an address by Prof. 

 W. Ostwald, of Leipsic, on The Failure of 

 Scientific Materialism, the reading of which 

 suggested the following considerations : 



Leaving aside the intrinsic value of his 

 statements, I wish to call attention to the sen- 

 sational manner in which they are announced, 

 and to the implied claims on them as original 

 thoughts, or, indeed, as the author himself 

 says, as indisputable, though startling, scien- 

 tific discoveries. He tells us that the atomo- 

 mechanical theory, which he styles "scien- 

 tific materialism," has proved an absolute 

 failure ; that he proposes to deal it its death- 

 blow, and lay the foundations of a new and 

 truly scientific doctrine the "energistic 

 theory " ; that, whatever effects his discovery 

 may have on the ethical and religious systems 

 of the world, he is under moral obligation to 

 make known what he has found in Nature ; 

 that he is like a sailor who, having discerned 

 " breakers ahead," must warn his fellows of 

 the impending danger ; that he has " a duty 

 to discharge," and " should consider it wrong 

 if he failed to speak of what he has seen." 

 Further on he says that, although he is not 

 exactly the discoverer of the new truth 

 " which the departing century can offer the 

 dawning one," he is the first one to see that 

 u we have been in possession of the truth for 

 half a century without knowing it." 



Without intending any disrespect to Prof. 

 Ostwald, I must say that the body of his 

 article greatly disappoints the expectations 

 naturally aroused by this solemn preface. 

 While we prepare to see it demonstrated 

 that Newton's law of gravitation is a meta- 

 physical superstition ; that the human species 

 is doomed to disappear within the next gen- 

 eration, or some other wonderful and awful 

 novelty, we find nothing but very common 

 theories and hypotheses, which, however im- 

 portant and interesting in themselves, are 

 topics with which we have been acquainted 

 for a long time. His main contention is, that 

 we do not know of matter apart from its 

 " properties " ; that these properties are 

 nothing but manifestations of energy; and 

 that, therefore, energy is the only reality of 

 which we can speak with certainty, the be- 

 lief in a " substratum " or " bearer " of this 

 energy not being warranted by observation 

 or experiment. But whatever the validity 

 of these propositions may be, they are cer- 

 tainly as old as Aristotle, have been repeated 

 by Boscovich, Faraday, and others, and 

 vol. xxix 11 



adopted as an ultimate truth, as the funda- 

 mental principle of all science and philos- 

 ophy, by Mr. Herbert Spencer ; while among 

 metaphysicians it has been a common doc- 

 trine that energy, or resistance, is the final 

 criterion of reality. (See J. B. Stallo, Con- 

 cepts and Theories of Modern Physics, second 

 edition, chap, x ; Spencer's First Principles, 

 sees. 63, 68, VI, IS, 74, etc. ; Mansel's Meta- 

 physics, third edition, pp. 346-348, 328, 329.) 

 And if, pushing these speculations to their 

 logical consequences, we say that nothing is 

 known to us except as a mental impression, 

 or that, in ultimate analysis, the only reality, 

 or at least the only certainty, is our con- 

 sciousness, or the aggregate of our mental 

 states, and that we have no knowledge of 

 things in themselves, we shall only be re- 

 peating the theories of Berkeley, Hume, 

 Tracy, Kant, Bain, Mill, and almost all mod- 

 ern thinkers, as well as of the old Skeptics. 

 (See Bain's Mental Science, book ii, chap, 

 viii ; Kant's Pure Reason, " Esthetic " ; 

 Tracy, Ideologic, tome iv ; Hume's Human 

 Nature, etc. Tracy is one of the ablest ex- 

 pounders of this doctrine. Some of his 

 views are quoted and approved by Bain in 

 Emotions and Will, jin.) 



We look in vain for any new fact* in 

 Prof. Ostwald's article; and apart from a 

 few hints, as a passing notice of electrical 

 phenomena, his real scientific argument 

 against the mechanical theory is the irrever- 

 sibility of the phenomenal world, in contrast 

 with the reversibility of the mathematico- 

 mechanical formulas purporting to represent 

 the former (page 595). Without stopping 

 to show that his interpretation of mathe- 

 matical formulas is entirely inadequate, that 

 there is nothing intrinsically impossible 

 in the reversibility of natural phenomena, 

 and that his argument applies to " energis- 

 tics" as well as to the mechanical theory, 

 since the mechanical formulas have nothing 

 to do with " matter," but with energy (mass 

 being defined in terms of force Rankine's 

 Applied Mechanics, sec. 521), I shall again 

 have to say that the professor is here repeat- 

 ing the law of the Dissipation of Energy, 

 deduced by Sir William Thomson from ther- 

 modynamical principles; a consequence of 

 said law being a constant loss of the avail- 

 ability of energy and a tendency to universal 

 equilibrium. This law has been further 

 generalized by Prof. Delbceuf into " the law 

 of the fixation of force," according to which 

 no force, after being transmuted into an- 

 other, can restore itself to its original form. 

 Here are some of his statements: "Tout 

 changement a pour effet de faire passer la 

 force de l'etat transformable a l'etat intrans- 



