gistics, have exhibited in the light of the general theory of energy. All these things must indeed be so, if what I have said to you of the significance of the new theory is well founded. I need not revert to this again.
But I can not forbear proposing a final question. When we have succeeded in grasping a significant and fruit-bearing truth in its entire, even magnitude, we are only too easily inclined to regard all as likewise concluded in its circle which comes within the field in question. We see this fault perpetrated every day in science, and the opinion which I have devoted half of the time allotted to me in contesting has grown out of just such an error. We shall therefore have to ask ourselves at once. Is the energy which is so necessary and useful for the understanding of Nature also sufficient for that object? Or are there phenomena which can not be wholly accounted for by the laws of energy as they are yet known?
I believe that the responsibility which I have assumed toward you through my thesis can not be better discharged than by my declaring that these questions must be answered with a denial of the universal competency of energy. Immense as are the advantages which the energistic theory of the world has over the mechanical or the naturalistic, there can still, it seems to me, some points be indicated which are not covered by the acknowledged principles of energistics, and which, therefore, point to the existence of principles transcending these. Energistics will exist by the side of these new principles. Only it is not, as we must already perceive, to be the future most comprehensive principle for the mastering of natural phenomena, but will be manifest, presumably, as a particular instance of still more general conditions, of the form of which we at this time can certainly have hardly a foreboding.
I do not apprehend that what I have said has depreciated the mental advance for which so much has been claimed; I have myself extolled that advance. For it has more than once occurred to us that science can never and nowhere recognize any limits to its progress, and even in the midst of the contest for a new possession the eye should not be blind to the fact that beyond the ground we have succeeded in winning extend other stretches that must be acquired later on. In the former time we could put up with the dust and smoke of the conflict preventing our looking into the narrow limits of the battlefield. To-day this is no longer permissible; to-day we shoot with smokeless powder—or, at least, ought to—and have, therefore, with the possibility, also the duty, of not falling into the errors of earlier epochs.
