Science Quote by Wilhelm Ostwald

Ostwald is doing something more strategic than merely dating a discipline. The sentence is a lab-coated piece of institution-building: catalysis, he implies, deserves to be treated as its own “field” with a “position” inside a larger “general scheme” of science, even if it’s still embryonic. That framing matters. At the turn of the 20th century, chemistry was professionalizing fast, sorting itself into specialties, journals, and chairs. To say catalysis is in its “first stages” isn’t an admission of weakness so much as a claim on the future: invest now, because the map is being drawn and this territory is about to become valuable.

The bureaucratic heft of the prose is part of the move. “General consideration,” “general scheme,” “particular position” - Ostwald writes like someone constructing a taxonomy, not cracking open a flask. It’s a rhetorical performance of scientific maturity: the sentence sounds as if the conclusion “will immediately be realized,” turning an argument into an inevitability. That’s classic authority-building in an era when chemistry’s prestige depended on looking systematic, almost administrative.

Subtext: catalysis isn’t just a set of tricks that make reactions go faster; it’s a conceptual lever for understanding how chemical change happens at all. Ostwald, a key figure in physical chemistry, is nudging readers from craft to theory. By declaring the field young, he invites both patience with its gaps and ambition for its scope, positioning catalysis as the next organizing principle rather than a footnote to reactions already understood.