Hidrogênio e oxigênio em Ward (1919)

I borrow this expression from Wundt, [Nota de rodapé 1: “Logik.” Eine Untersuchung der Principien der Erkenntniss und der Methoder wissenschaftlicher Forschung. Von Wilhelm Wundt. Zwei Bände. Zwelte umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1895. Zweiter Band. Methodenlehre. Zweite Abtheilung. Logik der Geisteswissenschaften. Zweites Capitel. Die Logik der Psychologie, § 4. Die Principien der Psychologie; d: Das Princip der Schöplerisehen Synthese, pp. 267-281] who gives the central idea of it in the following passage: “There is absolutely no form which in the meaning and value of its content is not something more than the mere sum of its factors or than the mere mechanical resultant of its components” (p. 274). [Nota de rodapé 2: “Es gibt absolut kein solches Gebilde, das nicht nach der Bedeutung und dem Werth seines lnhaltes mehr wäre als die blosse Summe seiner Factoren oder die blosse mechanische Resultante seiner Componente,” loc. cit., p. 274.] But I shall make of it a still wider application than he does. It seems to me to embody the answer to a large amount of what passes for very wise, but what I have always regarded as not only superficial but also essentially false reasoning. The idea is so far-reaching that I cannot hope to present all its applications in this chapter. The most I can do is to lay down the principle and let the applications come at their proper times and places as we proceed. The conception was not [80] entirely new when I met with the expression in Wundt’s “Logik,” but this expression, I freely confess, had the effect to render it more definite and clear. As will be seen, it is a composite idea. The notion embodied in the second component is nothing more nor less than the fertile truth taught most clearly by chemistry that a compound of two substances is something more than the sum of those substances, and is in a proper sense a third and different substance. That its properties are in some way derived from and due to those of its components is not denied, but the relation is one that no human insight can fully comprehend. No one, for example, could predict in advance what kind of a substance would result from even so simple a combination as oxygen and hydrogen in the proportion of two atoms of the latter to one of the former. No one could have told till he had tried it whether the resulting substance would be a gas, like both the components, or a liquid, as it is at ordinary temperatures, or a solid, as it is at lower temperatures. Much less could any one have told what its properties would be. (Ward 1919:79-80)

WARD, Lester. 1919. Pure sociology: a treatise on the origin and spontaneous development of society. New York: The Macmillan Company.