energeticism also called energetism or energism, the doctrine that energy is the fundamental substance underlying all change. Its most prominent champion was the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932). In his address ‘Die Überwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus’ (‘The Conquest of Scientific Materialism’), delivered at Lübeck in 1895, Ostwald chastised the atomic-kinetic theory as lacking progress and claimed that a unified science, energetics, could be based solely on the concept of energy. Many of Ostwald’s criticisms of materialism and mechanistic reductionism derived from Mach. Ostwald’s attempts to deduce the fundamental equations of thermodynamics and mechanics from the principles of energy conservation and transformation were indebted to the writings of Georg Helm (1874–1919), especially Die Lehre von Energie (‘The Laws of Energy,’ 1887) and Die Energetik (‘Energetics,’ 1898). Ostwald defended Helm’s factorization thesis that all changes in energy can be analyzed as a product of intensity and capacity factors. The factorization thesis and the attempt to derive mechanics and thermodynamics from the principles of energetics were subjected to devastating criticisms by Boltzmann and Max Planck. Boltzmann also criticized the dogmatism of Ostwald’s rejection of the atomickinetic theory. Ostwald’s program to unify the sciences under the banner of energetics withered in the face of these criticisms. See also BOLTZ- MANN , MACH , PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENC. M.C.