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Updated: June 26, 2025
The Germany of the Hohenzollerns had its mortal wound at the Marne; the Germany we fight to-day is the Germany of Krupp and Ostwald. It is merely as if she had put aside a mask that had blinded her. She was methodical and civilised except for her head and aim; she will become entirely methodical. But the Britain and Russia and France she fights are lands full of the spirit of undefined novelty.
"It would never have begun," says Ostwald, "if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made different by one or the other view being correct. Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6.
We may believe with Professor Ostwald and his followers that the molecules of sugar merely glide everywhere between the molecules of water, without chemical action; or, on the other hand, dismissing this mechanical explanation, we may say with Mendeleef that the process of solution is the most active of chemical phenomena, involving that incessant interplay of atoms known as dissociation.
This definition was established by Professor W. Ostwald at the beginning of the present century, when he stated that the chemical element represents a condition of physical matter in which 'any chemical change results in an increase of weight'. In this way, the chemical concept of the element achieved a meaning which had actually been implicit in it from its first conception.
Wilhelm Ostwald, in his Victory of Scientific Materialism, has defended the same thesis with respect to modern physics and chemistry. At the present time we are regaled with the sight of learned friars laying aside for a moment their ancient tomes, and turning to dip into some manual of popular science, after which they go about and astonish simpletons by giving lectures.
The tawdry, rhetorical German Emperor, who had been the great antagonist at the outset, the last upholder of Cæsarism, God's anointed with the withered arm and the mailed fist, had receded from the foreground of the picture; that truer Germany which is thought and system, which is the will to do things thoroughly, the Germany of Ostwald and the once rejected Hindenburg, was coming to the fore.
All the peculiarities of electrolysis are capable of interpretation: the phenomena of the transport of ions, the fine experiments of M. Bouty, those of Professor Kohlrausch and of Professor Ostwald on various points in electrolytic conduction, all support the theory. The verifications of it can even be quantitative, and we can foresee numerical relations between conductivity and other phenomena.
In Germany the name of Simmel offers itself as that of a humanist of the most radical sort. Mach and his school, and Hertz and Ostwald must be classed as humanists. The view is in the atmosphere and must be patiently discussed. The best way to discuss it would be to see what the alternative might be. What is it indeed?
As Wilhelm Ostwald never tired of repeating, H O is a complete shorthand record for the bundle of qualities commonly known as water. It is an example of that highest task of mind, synthesis.
To take in the importance of Peirce's principle, one must get accustomed to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct use of the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of science, tho he had not called it by that name.
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