HKB
finger drew the trigger. We may revolve all we please but under the guidance of Herr Duehring we always come back over and over again to the finger of God.
From astronomy our realist philosopher passes on to mechanics and physics and complains that the mechanical theory of heat has brought us no further in the course of a generation than the point which Robert Mayer reached by his own efforts. Moreover the whole thing is very obscure. We must "always remember that with conditions of the movement of matter statical conditions are also given and that these last are not measured in mechanical work. If we have earlier typified nature as a great workwoman, and we still hold to the statement, we must now add that the static condition, the condition of rest, does not imply any mechanical labor. We are again without the bridge from the static to the dynamic and if latent heat, so called, is up to the present a stumbling block to the theory we can recognise a lack which may be denied in the cosmic process."
This whole oracular utterance is again merely an outpouring of bad science which very clearly perceives that it has got itself into a place from which it cannot be saved by creating motion from a state of absolute freedom from motion, and is ashamed to call upon its only saviour, the Creator of heaven and earth. If in mechanics, heat included, there is no bridge to be found from statics to dynamics, from equipoise to motion, why should Herr Duehring be obliged to find a bridge from his condition of absence of motion to motion? Thus he would have the luck to escape from his dilemma.
In ordinary mechanics the bridge from statics to dynamics is--the push from the outside. If a stone of the weight of a hundred grammes be lifted ten meters high and then flung free so that it should remain hanging in a self-contained condition and in a state of rest, you would have to appeal to a public of sucking infants to declare that the existing condition of that body represents no mechanical labor and that its removal from its earlier condition has no measure in mechanical work. Any passerby would tell Herr Duehring that the stone did not come on the string by its own efforts and the first good hand book in mechanics would inform him that if he let the stone fall again, the latter in its fall does just as much mechanical work as is necessary to lift it to the height of ten meters. The very simple fact that the stone is suspended represents mechanical force in itself, since if it remain long enough, the string breaks, as soon as it, as a result of its chemical constitution, is no longer strong enough to hold the stone. All mechanical phenomena, may, we must inform Herr Duehring, be reduced to just such simple fundamental forms, and the engineer is still unborn who cannot discover the bridge from statics to dynamics as long as he has sufficient initial force at his disposal.