Major Prophets of To-Day

by Edwin E. Slosson

"I have set my heart on nothing, you see
And so the world goes well with me."

One is irresistibly impelled to quote Johnson's remark:

"Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher."

Boswell tags this in his usual style with the observation that this very question was "very happily illustrated" by the Reverend Mr. Robert Brown at Utrecht, who said that "a small drinking glass and a very large one may be equally full, but the large one holds more than the small."

Ostwald applies his formula to James's "Varieties of Religious Experience", and shows that the convert leaves the mourner's bench at the moment when the factor (E - W) changes its sign from minus to plus. (Here W apparently stands for the devil.) The equation also serves him as an argument against the use of alcohol and other narcotics, which, though they temporarily reduce W by sinking all unpleasantnesses below the threshold of consciousness, are likely to make happiness a minus quantity. Wealth, being the most compact and convenient form of energy, may serve to increase E or diminish W, but not in proportion to its amount. Dramatic criticism may even be made mathematical. Jaques has a large W; Rosalind has a large E; put them together and you have "As You Like It."

But I should not devote so much space to what is merely an extreme and, some would say, an extravagant application of Ostwald's philosophy.[1] It is, however, a characteristic example of his mode of thought and may serve as well as any other to introduce the reader to his fundamental theory of energetics, which formed the leading principle of his chemical work, and which he has now carried over into the fields of philosophy and sociology.

It is not necessary to explain the modern conception of energy, for we all learned about it in our school days, and here we need only have in mind its two fundamental laws. The first is the law of the conservation of energy, discovered by Mayer, which states that the amount of energy remains unchanged whatever its transformations. To take a familiar example, when we buy coal, we are really buying chemical energy, not carbon. When we burn it, we let the carbon go off up the chimney, but the heat energy we keep as completely as possible, and by means of a boiler transform it into the expansive energy of steam, which is converted into the motion energy of piston rod and wheel, and when connected with a dynamo may become electrical energy. The electrical energy we can conduct by a wire into our homes and there convert it into the light energy of an incandescent bulb, the heat energy of an electric griddle, or the motion energy of a fan or carpet sweeper. That is, whenever any kind of energy disappears, some other kind of energy crops up somewhere in exactly equivalent amount. In any experiment where they can be measured, the income and outgo of energy will be found to balance exactly, just like a bookkeeper's ledger.

But here is another thing to consider. The fact that a trial balance comes out even does not prove that the concern is not losing money, and we see the same thing in the energy business. In the series of transformations we have followed above, from the coal of the power house to the utensils of the household, there is leakage all along the line, a little lost in friction and radiated heat in each of the machines, and a big waste, some eighty-five per cent, in the steam engine. Ostwald uses the ingenious illustration of a traveler who goes through Europe changing his money at every frontier, and losing a little each time through the changer's discount. A good money changer is one who is satisfied with a moderate commission. A good machine is one that gives back to us almost as much as we give it. But there is none perfect, no, not one.

This is the second fundamental law of thermodynamics,[2] the law of the degradation of energy. For energy has a sort of gravitation of its own. It always wants to run down hill. Heat seeks its level as well as water. If we lay a hot plate, say, a temperature of 100°, on or under a plate at zero, the heat will spread to the cold plate until both are at 50°, disregarding radiation losses. And when they have come to the same temperature, it is impossible to get out of them any further heat movement. "You cannot run the mill with the water that's gone by." You have to have a fall of temperature to run any kind of heat engine. Every machine, every chemical and physical process, every living being, is leaking energy all the time, that is, transforming it into unavailable forms. That is the way we get our living. The sun is dissipating its heat energy throughout space at a great rate. Our allies, the plants, manage to catch a tiny bit of it and store it in starch and oil, but we eat these and send the energy on its way as heat again. The whole universe, regarded as a big machine, is running down like a clock and, it seems, must ultimately come to a stop, unless, indeed, there is a self-winding attachment hidden away in it somewhere, or somebody outside of it all to wind it up occasionally.

This, however, is one of those questions which Ostwald calls "pseudo-problems" and from which he would free us by applying the energetic philosophy. His test is the following: "Suppose the problem solved and assume any one of all possible answers to be correct, we can then investigate what effect this would have on our conduct. If it produces no effect, the problem is thereby indicated to be a pseudo-problem." He takes for example the following: