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During the past quarter century there has grown up a literally stupendous literature which has had as its major objective the interpretation and the denning of mental mechanisms in health and in disease with implications that were explanatory of the whole range of mental functions. A great deal of this literature has been written around specific, concrete situations. Some of it has been more general in its scope, and much of it has been highly speculative and philosophical.
I have always felt that it would be a worth while endeavor to attempt the coordination of this great mass of facts and speculations, and to attempt to cast it in a mold of formulations that would relate it to the general body of science. To do this successfully would require, naturally, that the material should be expressed in terms common to all science and inasmuch as the concept “energy” is the most generic of all scientific concepts it would seem as if the formulations should be expressed in terms of energy.
To do this would seem to be an adventure in the field of philosophy and therefore to some, at least, a departure from scientific method. With this, however, I cannot agree. Of course I shall have to start with the acknowledgment that I do not know what energy is. In this respect I am not alone for I surmise that if we should turn to the physicist we would find him equally impotent to offer a satisfactory definition. All we know is that energy is a term which we give to a certain hypothetical something that lies back of “change,” in other words that it is something that does “work,” brings things to pass. We know energy only by what it does.
Such an approach is of course philosophical but it is the sort of philosophy to which we are all of necessity committed. We cannot, in its ultimate meaning, define anything. The best we can do is to accept certain postulates and reason from them “as if” they were true. To the acceptance of certain postulates we are committed from the moment of our birth.