It will be remarked that the idea of time does not intervene in our estimation of work. The notion of work is independent of the ideas of velocity and time. "The greater or less time that we take to do a piece of work is of no more assistance in measuring its magnitude than the number of years that a man may have taken to grow rich or to ruin himself can help to estimate the present amount of his fortune."
Going back to Carnot's comparison, an employer who employed his workmen only on piece-work,—that is to say, who would only care about the amount of work done, and would be indifferent to the time that they took over it,—would be at the same point of view as the advocates of the mechanical theory. M. Bouasse, whom we follow here, has remarked that this idea of mechanical work may be traced back to Descartes. His predecessors, and Galileo in particular, had quite a different idea of the way in which mechanical activity should be measured; and so, among the mathematicians of the eighteenth century, Leibniz and, later, John Bernoulli were almost alone in looking at it from this point of view.
Energy.—Work thus understood is mechanical energy. It represents the lasting and objective effect of the mechanical activity independent of all the circumstances under which it was carried out. The same work may be done under very different conditions of time, velocity, force, and displacement. It is therefore the permanent element in the variety of mechanical aspects. Work, for example, in the collision of bodies when the motion of a body appears to be destroyed on impact with another, reappears as indestructible vis viva. This, then, is exactly what
