Just now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are
witnessing a curious reversion to the common-sense way of looking at
physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such men as
Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to these teachers no hypothesis
is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy of
reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part, to be
compared solely from the point of view of their USE. The only
literally true thing is REALITY; and the only reality we know is,
for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux of our sensations
and emotions as they pass. 'Energy' is the collective name
(according to Ostwald) for the sensations just as they present
themselves (the movement, heat, magnetic pull, or light, or whatever
it may be) when they are measured in certain ways. So measuring
them, we are enabled to describe the correlated changes which they
show us, in formulas matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness
for human use. They are sovereign triumphs of economy in thought.
No one can fail to admire the 'energetic' philosophy. But the
hypersensible entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their
own with most physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal.
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