The elucidations which I here offer are, in part, substantially contained in my treatise, Die Geschichte und… — Ernst Mach
The elucidations which I here offer are, in part, substantially contained in my treatise, Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzcs von der Erhaltung der Arbeit (...1872). At a later date nearly the same views were expressed by Kirchhoff (Vorlesungen über mathematische Physik: Mechanik, Leipsic, 1874) and by Helmholtz (Die Thatsachen in der Wahrnehmung, Berlin, 1879), and have since become commonplace enough. Still the matter, as I conceive it, does not seem to have been exhausted, and I cannot deem my exposition to be at all superfluous.
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[I]t is necessary to make a distinction between mechanical experience and mechanical science... If we carefully examine the ancient Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, we shall find there pictorial representations of many kinds of implements and mechanical contrivances... long before theory was dreamed of, implements, machines, mechanical experiences, and mechanical knowledge were abundant.
The questions here dealt with have occupied me since my earliest youth, when my interest for them was powerfully stimulated by the beautiful introductions of Lagrange to... his Analytic Mechanics, as well as by the lucid and lively tract of Jolly, Principien der Mechanik (...1852). If Duehring's estimable work, Kritische Geschichte der Principien der Mechanik (...1873), did not particularly influence me, it was that at the time of its appearance, my ideas had been... published. ...[T]he reader will... find many points of agreement between Dühring's criticisms and those here expressed.
An instinctive, irreflective knowledge of the processes of nature will doubtless always precede the scientific, conscious apprehension, or investigation, of phenomena. The former is the outcome of the relation in which the processes of nature stand to the satisfaction of our wants.
