It is manifested, quite sincerely and without
the slightest reserve, in all the classical works devoted to physics.
Thus Verdet, an illustrious professor who has had the greatest and
most happy influence on the intellectual formation of a whole
generation of scholars, and whose works are even at the present day
very often consulted, wrote: "The true problem of the physicist is
always to reduce all phenomena to that which seems to us the simplest
and clearest, that is to say, to movement." In his celebrated course
of lectures at l'Ecole Polytechnique, Jamin likewise said: "Physics
will one day form a chapter of general mechanics;" and in the preface
to his excellent course of lectures on physics, M. Violle, in 1884,
thus expresses himself: "The science of nature tends towards mechanics
by a necessary evolution, the physicist being able to establish solid
theories only on the laws of movement." The same idea is again met
with in the words of Cornu in 1896: "The general tendency should be to
show how the facts observed and the phenomena measured, though first
brought together by empirical laws, end, by the impulse of successive
progressions, in coming under the general laws of rational mechanics;"
and the same physicist showed clearly that in his mind this connexion
of phenomena with mechanics had a deep and philosophical reason, when,
in the fine discourse pronounced by him at the opening ceremony of the
Congres de Physique in 1900, he exclaimed: "The mind of Descartes
soars over modern physics, or rather, I should say, he is their
luminary.
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