Excerpt from Metaphysics of Energy The problem of energy has generally been left to the scientist. It is taken for granted that energy is a fact of our experience, and that philosophy has little to say about matters of. fact that have their certitude established by universal belief of mankind. From the savage to the savant, it is held as an undisputed fact that there is power in nature, power in us, and power in any conceivable form of ulterior reality. Men may differ as to the nature of this power, but nobody questions the fact itself. The aboriginal reduced nature to a congeries of wills and propitiated them. The later scientists and positivists, in their attempt to free nature from all anthropomorphic ideas, purged it of all forces and wills. But this so-called emancipation of scientific thought, though useful for the immediate purposes of science, left nature a huge and inexplicable illusion, leading most of these thinkers naturally to agnosticism; for, change is a patent fact of experience; how can it be explained without some power behind it? And yet the nature of this power defies thought. Humanity, as represented by the history of Western culture and civilization, has thus wavered between blind faith and agnosticism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.