connected with the kinetic theory, and it should not be exposed therefore to the vicissitudes experienced by that theory. It is of a higher order of truth. We can derive it from a less unsafe idea, namely that of the connection of natural phenomena. To conceive it we must get accustomed to this primordial truth, that there are no phenomena isolated in time and space. This statement contains the whole point of view of energetics.
The physics of early days had only an incomplete view of things, for it considered phenomena independently the one of the other.
Phenomena for purposes of analysis were classed in separate and distinct compartments: weight, heat, electricity, magnetism, light. Each phenomenon was studied without reference to that it succeeded or that which should follow. Nothing could be more artificial than such a method as this. In fact, there is a sequence in everything, everything is connected up, everything precedes and succeeds in nature—in nature there are only series. The isolated fact without antecedent or consequent is a myth. Each phenomenal manifestation is in solidarity with another. It is a metamorphosis of one state of things into another. It is transformation. It implies a state of things anterior to that which we are observing, a phenomenal form which has preceded the form of the present moment.
Now there exists a link between the anterior state and the succeeding state—that is to say, between the new form which is appearing and the preceding form which is disappearing. The science of energy shows that something has passed from the first condition to the second, but covering itself as it were with a new
