It is evident that we here go beyond any possible experience, at least for the present, and that experience has again become poorer and our concepts fewer in number. All that we can now demand is that certain combinations of numbers, some of which represent mechanical mass and others electrical charge, have proper relations to each other when integrated throughout the entire body of the electron. Similar questions confront us when we ask what are the forces which the parts of the electron exert on each other. We return to this question in considering the nature of the electrical concepts. In any event, the concepts of both force and mass are entirely altered in this domain. It is interesting to note, in passing, that present electrical theory gives no meaning to the mass of the elements of the electron, since the total electromagnetic mass of the electron is built up from the _mutual_ terms in the action of the elements--the total mass is not a _linear_ resultant of the action of the elements. THE CONCEPT OF ENERGY In examining the concept of energy, we start with purely mechanical energy. In isolated mechanical systems, in which there are only conservative forces, the sum of kinetic and potential energy is constant. The kinetic energy may be defined as ∑ ½ mv^2, formed for all parts of the body. The potential energy is determined by the position of the parts of the system, and has physical significance only with reference to a datum position, that is, only changes of potential energy have meaning in terms of operations. The total energy ascribed to the system has therefore an element of arbitrariness in that the datum position may be chosen at random, and energy acquires meaning only on tracing the history back to the epoch of the datum position. The concept of energy may be extended from mechanical systems to all systems with which we are acquainted; the operations by which meaning is given to the extended energy concept involve the generalized conservation principle, or the first law of thermodynamics. The extension to thermal systems is immediate; the inclusion of optical and electrical systems in the scheme was a most important physical step, which of course required careful experimental justification. Because of its wide range of application, the energy concept has now come to be regarded as one of the most important in physics; this idea was held by Ostwald[18] twenty and more years ago, and is now much to the front because of the connection between mass and energy indicated by the theory of relativity, and the important rôle assigned to energy levels in spectrum analysis. [Footnote 18: W. Ostwald, Die Energie, Barth, Leipzig, 1908.]