Science Quote by Wilhelm Ostwald

Ostwald is drawing a line in the sand: catalysis doesn’t become intelligible by staring harder at substances, but by changing the kind of question chemistry asks. Before “rate” becomes a formal concept, a catalyst is doomed to look like alchemy’s leftover mystery - something that makes reactions “go” without being consumed, an awkward exception in a discipline that wanted neat balances and stoichiometric bookkeeping. His sentence insists that catalysis is not primarily a thing but a relationship in time.

The intent is methodological, almost political in a scientific sense. Ostwald is staking out the agenda of physical chemistry in the late 19th century: quantify, measure, mathematize. By calling a rational view “absolutely dependent” on reaction rate, he’s smuggling in a hierarchy of explanation. Mechanisms and molecular stories are secondary; what counts as understanding is the ability to describe how fast a transformation proceeds and how that speed can be systematically altered.

The subtext carries a quiet rebuke to older chemical intuitions. Catalysts had been known in practice (fermentation, acids, metals) long before they were “understood,” but practical knowledge doesn’t satisfy Ostwald’s standard of rationality. He’s also implicitly separating catalysis from the tempting but misleading idea that a catalyst “adds” something to the reaction. Instead, it changes the kinetics, not the thermodynamic destination.

Context matters: Ostwald helped build the kinetic and equilibrium framework that turned chemistry into an industrial-age science of control - not just what substances are, but what they can be made to do, on schedule, at scale. In that light, “rate” isn’t a technicality; it’s the key that turns chemistry from description into engineering.