Science Quote by Wilhelm Ostwald

Ostwald is doing something more audacious here than reporting a tidy lab result: he’s narrating the moment chemistry starts to behave like a law-governed, measurable system rather than a cabinet of curiosities. The sentence is built like a victory lap disguised as modest bookkeeping. “Soon afterwards” and “immediately found” compress time to suggest inevitability. Discovery, in this telling, isn’t a lightning strike; it’s what happens when you aim the right conceptual lens at the right “classical reaction” and watch it fall into line.

The key phrase is “determined quantitatively.” Ostwald isn’t satisfied that acids “affect” inversion of sugar; he wants their influence to be expressible in numbers and governed by a single underlying property. That’s the subtext of “the same property of the acids”: a push toward unification, the signature ambition of physical chemistry. He’s implying that acids have an identity that matters beyond taste, corrosion, or vague “strength” - an operationally defined, comparable parameter that predicts behavior across different reactions.

Then he adds the sly scientific mic drop: “as was of course to be expected.” It’s confidence framed as restraint, a rhetorical move that upgrades his earlier findings into a general principle. Context matters: in an era when chemistry was professionalizing and leaning hard into thermodynamics and kinetics, Ostwald’s voice models the new ideal scientist - not the collector of exceptions, but the architect of frameworks where even “classical” textbook reactions become test cases for a broader, quantitative worldview.