Vocal advocate of the Law of Conservation of Energy. While defending the dynamical theory of heat in 1839, he unexpectedly exclaimed "besides the known chemical elements, there is only one other agent, and that is called force; it can appear under various circumstances as motion, chemical affinity, cohesion, electricity, light, heat, and magnetism, and from any one of these types of phenomena all the others can be called forth." Clearly, this grand proclamation was nothing more but a jump of faith. Moore was not alone in his adherence to the interconvertibility of phenomena in nature. The persistent occurrence of mental jumps like these suggests that many of the discoverers of energy conservation were deeply predisposed to see a single indestructible force at the root of all natural phenomena. Thus, like Leibniz's early convictions, some of the most impassioned statements of the necessity of an all-encompassing conservation law were proposed purely out of conviction that the regularity of nature required the existence of such a law. Physical theories, however, require more than conviction to become accepted as fact. The experimental method is necessary to establish the viability of any given theory. Thus, it was not until actual quantitative experiments were performed that this principle could be truly established.

Leibniz