- geneous among one another, and that their apparent
heterogeneity is only the result of the intervention of our sensorium. They differ only in so far as movements are capable of differing—that is to say, in velocity, mass, and trajectory. There is something fundamental which is common to them and this quid commune is energy. Thus the idea of energy may be derived from the kinetic conception, and this is the usual method of exposition.
This method has the great inconvenience of causing an idea which lays claim to reality to depend upon an hypothesis. And besides that, it gives a view of it which may be false. It makes of the different forms of energy something more than varieties which are equivalent to one another. It makes of them one and the same thing. It blends into one the modalities of energy and mechanical energy. For the experimental idea of equivalence, the kinetic theory substitutes the arbitrary idea of the equality, the blending, and the fundamental homogeneity of phenomena. This no doubt is how the founders of energetics, Helmholtz, Clausius, and Lord Kelvin understood things. But a more attentive study and a more scrupulous determination not to go beyond the teaching of experiment should compel us to reform this manner of looking at it. And it is Ostwald's merit that, after Hamilton, he insisted on this truth—that the various kinds of physical magnitudes furnished by the observation of phenomena are different and characteristic. In particular, we may distinguish among them those which belong to the order of scalar magnitudes and others which are of the order of vector magnitudes.
The Idea of Energy derived from the Connection of Phenomena.—The idea of energy is not absolutely
