Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/483

Rh "The truths of science are thus coming into evident accord with those doctrines of religious belief which are common to all creeds. We are, however, as far as ever from the determination of the question whether those higher forms of force and energy have quantivalent relations and intertransformability; although a belief that mind and matter have a certain identity, and that in matter can be discerned 'the promise and potency of all terrestrial life/ has been avowed, explicitly or implicitly, by more than one great thinker when wandering into the realms of speculation."

In this, Tyndall long anticipated our contemporary writers. Lavoisier showed to the satisfaction of the scientific men of his time that matter is indestructible, whatever the apparent result of chemical action. Faraday, and probably many among his predecessors, recognized that the forces are indestructible, and that great investigator wrote:

"To admit that force may be destructible, or can altogether disappear, would be to admit that matter could be uncreated; for we know matter only by its forces."

Liebig fully recognized the distinction between the proper use, of the term, force and energy, and usually called the latter 'power' as when he says:

"Man by food not only maintains the perfect structure of the body, but he daily inlays a store of power and heat, derived in the first instance from the sun. This power and heat, latent for a time, reappears and again becomes active when the living structures are resolved by the vital processes into their original elements."

Carpenter clearly saw these distinctions and recognized the nature of energy, as distinguished from force, when, in his discussion of the action of the vital forces, he asserted:

"What the germ really supplies is not the force but the directive agency; thus rather resembling the control exercised by the superintendent builder, who is charged with working out the designs of the architect, than the bodily force of the workmen who labor under his guidance in the construction of the fabric."

Carpenter says explicitly:

"Hence we seem justified in affirming that the correlation between heat and the organizing forces of plants is not less intimate than that