Aging & Wisdom Quote by Wilhelm Ostwald

Ostwald is drawing a line in the sand: catalysis stopped being a bag of clever lab tricks and became a coherent science the moment chemists began thinking in rates. The sentence is deliberately clunky because it’s doing disciplinary work. By framing the “distinction” as “so great” that it “asserted itself,” Ostwald makes the shift sound less like a human debate and more like an impersonal historical force. That’s a classic move from a scientist building a field: present your preferred framework as what reality itself demanded.

The specific intent is to elevate kinetics - the concept that reactions have measurable speeds governed by laws - as the decisive upgrade over earlier “formulations” that leaned on static ideas like affinity, composition, or vague catalytic “powers.” In Ostwald’s world, a catalyst isn’t magic; it’s a factor that changes the pathway and therefore the rate, without being consumed. That sounds obvious now, but at the turn of the 20th century it was a reorientation of chemistry toward process and mechanism, not just substances and results.

The subtext is institutional. Ostwald was a central architect of physical chemistry, a discipline fighting for legitimacy against older descriptive traditions. Calling the kinetics-infused view “objective development” is a rhetorical bid to canonize his camp’s methods as the modern standard. It also hints at why catalysis mattered beyond the bench: industry runs on throughput. Once you measure and control rates, you don’t just understand reactions; you can scale them, optimize them, and turn chemistry into infrastructure.