Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 19
The “Wide Field” — Why Physics Contains So Much
To the historical-scientific reason a structural one is added, which explains the scope of this part. If mechanics stands at the beginning and life at the end, then everything in between must fall under chemism — in the broad sense.
In today’s terms, this comprises: thermodynamics with heat, phase transitions, and self-organization; electricity and magnetism with their polarities; crystal formation with symmetries and structures; chemistry in the narrower sense; and geological processes with their cycles.
And precisely this field lay uncultivated in Hegel’s time. Thermodynamics begins in the 1850s with Clausius, the periodic table comes in 1869 with Mendeleev, electrodynamics in the 1860s with Maxwell, and crystallography is still in its infancy.
Hegel nonetheless attempted an ordering, with the means available to him. The result is outdated — but the task remains: between mechanics and life lie qualitative stages that are systematically connected. Reordering this field with today’s science would be the work; logic would provide the orientation, empirical inquiry the content. [KF]