_Its Two Forms._—It is interesting to note that chemical energy may also be regarded from the two states of _potential_ and _kinetic energy_. The coal-oxygen system, to burn in the furnace of the steam engine, must be primed by preliminary work (local ignition), just as the weight that is raised and left motionless at a certain height requires a small effort to be detached from its support. When this condition is fulfilled, energy is at once manifest. We must admit that it existed in the latent state, in the state of _chemical potential energy_. Under the impulse received, the carbon combines with the oxygen and forms carbonic acid, C + 2O becomes CO⌄{2}; potential energy is changed into actual chemical energy, and immediately afterwards into thermal energy. We should have only a very incomplete and fragmentary view of the reality of things if we were to consider this phenomenon of combustion in isolation. We must consider it in connection with what has actually created the energy which it is about to dissipate. This antecedent fact is the action of the sun upon the green leaf. The carbon which burns in the furnace of the machine comes from the mine in which it was stored in the form of coal—that is to say, of a product which was vegetable in its primitive form, and which was formed at the expense of the carbonic acid of the air. The plant had separated, at the expense of the solar energy, the carbon from the oxygen to which it was united in the carbonic acid of the atmosphere. It had created the system C + 2O. So that the solar energy produces the chemical potential energy which was so long before it was utilized. Combustion expends this energy in making carbonic acid over again. _Materialization of Energy._—The fertility of the idea of energy is therefore, as we see from all these examples, due to the relations it establishes between the natural phenomena of which it exhibits the necessary relation, destroyed by the excessive analysis of early science. It shows us that in the world of phenomena there is nothing but transformations of energy. And we regard these transformations themselves as the circulation of a kind of indestructible agent which passes from one form of determination to another, as if it were simply putting on a fresh disguise. If our intellect requires images or symbols to embrace the facts and to grasp their relation, it may introduce them here. It will materialize energy, it will make of it a kind of imaginary being, and confer upon it an objective reality. And for the mind, as long as it does not become the dupe of the phantom which it itself has created, this is an eminently comprehensive artifice which enables us to grasp readily the relations between phenomena and their bond of affiliation.