On Energy (-1849)

"Numbers are the sources of form and energy in the world. They are dynamic and active even among themselves […] almost human in their capacity for mutual influence." (Theon of Symyma, "Mathematics Useful for Understanding Plato" ["Expositio rerum mathematicarum ad legendum Platonem utilem", cca. 100–130)

"The principles of all knowledge are founded in mind; the mind of man, either animated by desire or pressed by necessity, puts in action it’s various energies, and unfolds the seeds of knowledge." (George Adams, "Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy" Vol. 3, 1794)

"But, as the universe is an extremely complex machine; the arrangement of the various parts of which it is composed, its preservation, and the play and energy of its springs, depend on an infinite number of general as well as particular laws. The most general admit of no exception. The exceptions attach on the detail; their number increases in proportion as the laws are specrfſed and particularized, and thus become more and more limited and restricted by other laws. Hence the exceptions themselves iorm new laws and means employed for a higher end. Apparent disorder in the parts is thus absorbed in the order of the whole, and the small defects gradually vanish in the eye of the philosopher as he proceeds to view nature on a more extended scale." (Johann H Lambert, "The System of the World", 1800)

"In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy [...] its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter?" (Humphry Davy, "Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide", 1800)

"The imagination […] that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors." (Samuel T Coleridge, "The Statesman's Manual", 1816)

"For truth is simple and without fuss, whereas error affords opportunity for dissipating time and energy." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1829)

"There seems to me to be something analogous to polarized intensity in the pure imaginary part; and to unpolarized energy" (indifferent to direction) in the real part of a quaternion: and thus we have some slight glimpse of a future Calculus of Polarities. This is certainly very vague […]" (Sir William R Hamilton,"On Quaternions; or on a new System of Imaginaries in Algebra", 1844)

"I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction, in common I believe with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action." (Michael Faraday, "On the Magnetization of Light and the Illumination of Magnetic Lines of Force", [Paper read to the Royal Institution] 1845)