ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

ORDER OUT OF CHAOS 110
further and concluded that the balance between oxygen consumption
and heat loss was merely the particular manifestation
of the existence of an indestructible "force" underlying all
phenomena.
This tendency to see natural phenomena as the products of
an underlying reality that remains constant throughout its
transformations is strikingly reminiscent of Kant. Kant's influence
can also be recognized in another idea held by some
physiologists, the distinction between vitalism as philosophical
speculation and the problem of scientific methodology. For
those physiologists, even if there was a "vital" force underlying
the function of living beings, the object of physiology
would nonetheless be purely physicochemical in nature. From
the two points of view mentioned, Kantianism, which ratified
the systematic form taken by mathematical physics during the
eighteenth century, can also be identified as one of the roots of
the renewal of physics in the nineteenth century.9
Helmholtz quite openly acknowledged Kant's influence.
For Helmholtz, the principle of the conservation of energy was
merely the embodiment in physics of the general a priori requirement
on which all science is based-the postulate that
there is a basic invariance underlying natural transformations:
The problem of the sciences is, in the first place, to seek
the laws by which the particular processes of nature may
be referred to, and deduced from, general rules.
We are justified, and indeed impelled in this proceeding,
by the conviction that every change in nature must
have a sufficient cause. The proximate causes to which
we refer phenomena may, in themselves, be either variable
or invariable; in the former case the above conviction
impels us to seek for causes to account for the
change, and thus we proceed until we at length arrive at
final causes which are unchangeable, and which therefore
must, in all cases where the exterior conditions are
the same, produce the same invariable effects. The final
aim of the theoretic natural sciences is therefore to discover
the ultimate and unchangeable causes of natural
phenomena. tO
With the principle of the conservation of energy, the idea of