For energy alone can be common to all phenomena.
This extreme manner of regarding things is seductive by its
originality, but appears somewhat insufficient if, after enunciating
generalities, we look more closely into the question. From the
philosophical point of view it may, moreover, seem difficult not to
conclude, from the qualities which reveal, if you will, the varied
forms of energy, that there exists a substance possessing these
qualities. This energy, which resides in one region, and which
transports itself from one spot to another, forcibly brings to mind,
whatever view we may take of it, the idea of matter.
Helmholtz endeavoured to construct a mechanics based on the idea of
energy and its conservation, but he had to invoke a second law, the
principle of least action. If he thus succeeded in dispensing with the
hypothesis of atoms, and in showing that the new mechanics gave us to
understand the impossibility of certain movements which, according to
the old, ought to have been but never were experimentally produced, he
was only able to do so because the principle of least action necessary
for his theory became evident in the case of those irreversible
phenomena which alone really exist in Nature.
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