and which was formed at the expense of the carbonic acid of the air. The plant had separated, at the expense of the solar energy, the carbon from the oxygen to which it was united in the carbonic acid of the atmosphere. It had created the system C + 2O. So that the solar energy produces the chemical potential energy which was so long before it was utilized. Combustion expends this energy in making carbonic acid over again.
Materialization of Energy.—The fertility of the idea of energy is therefore, as we see from all these examples, due to the relations it establishes between the natural phenomena of which it exhibits the necessary relation, destroyed by the excessive analysis of early science. It shows us that in the world of phenomena there is nothing but transformations of energy. And we regard these transformations themselves as the circulation of a kind of indestructible agent which passes from one form of determination to another, as if it were simply putting on a fresh disguise. If our intellect requires images or symbols to embrace the facts and to grasp their relation, it may introduce them here. It will materialize energy, it will make of it a kind of imaginary being, and confer upon it an objective reality. And for the mind, as long as it does not become the dupe of the phantom which it itself has created, this is an eminently comprehensive artifice which enables us to grasp readily the relations between phenomena and their bond of affiliation.
The world appears to us then, as we said at the outset, constructed with singular symmetry. It offers to us nothing but transformations of matter and transformations of energy; these two kinds of meta-
