Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/562

558 As for love, it is an instinct which has grown to be a moral necessity—a social compulsion that has been so fully absorbed into the individual consciousness as to assume the character of love. Rephrasing the old injunction, to meet modern needs, we find the new form of the ethical ideal to be:

 Love thy neighbor in proportion to his social worth. Love thy people and mankind more than thyself.

The crux and point of departure of Ostwald's ethical views, as may be perceived from the foregoing exposition, is to be found in the tacit assumption that the activities of mind are but variants of energy, in the sense in which this term is used in physics. It is, then, strictly comparable with the phenomena of electricity, of heat, of matter in motion, and must be intertransmutable with them, as they are with one another. If the assumption is valid; the principles of thermodynamics are applicable in the domain of Mind and Ostwald's philosophical edifice rests on a solid foundation. If it is not valid, his entire line of argument is reduced to a reasoning by analogy.

Let us then ask, whether the deductions from experience that we call "laws of thermodynamics" are such as to necessarily include all forms of energy or only those which we have learned to measure, as chemical, electrical, mechanical or thermal energy. The latter we can, and do, quantitatively determine. When a phenomenon involving them occurs, we can measure the exact number of units of each energy-form present both before and after the phenomenon and, by doing so, we know that the sum of these units previous to the phenomenon is equal to the sum of the units after, although the relative amounts of the different kinds may have greatly changed. This is the essence and substance of the positive knowledge from which the theory of thermodynamics has, by logical methods, been deduced.

If we use the term "energy" for powers that are not quantitatively determinable, that we can not measure in so and so many heat units, we should make it clear to ourselves that we are applying it to something that may, or may not, be identical with the "energy" known to physics. Its identity remains to be demonstrated.

At present, it is difficult to conceive by what experiments the "energy" represented by any logical process or by an emotion of love, hate or fear, could be measured in units of heat or electricity. It is, in fact, so difficult as to arouse a strong suspicion that intellectual and emotional manifestations of mind are something else than forms of physical energy. But, whether or no this suspicion corresponds to a "truth," it is certain that no one has yet affirmatively shown that such phenomena are subject to thermodynamical laws and, until this is shown, the reasoning of Ostwald, highly interesting and suggestive as it is, can not be held to be without logical flaw.