But my opinions will be best explained by a rapid exemplification in the processes of Nature, from the first rudiments of individualized life in the lowest classes of its two great poles, the vegetable and animal creation, to its crown and consummation in the human body; thus illustrating at once the unceasing _polarity of life, as the form of its process, and its tendency to progressive individuation as the law of its direction_.
Among the conceptions, of the mere ideal character of which the philosopher is well aware, and which yet become necessary from the necessity of assuming a beginning; the original fluidity of the planet is the chief. Under some form or other it is expressed or implied in every system of cosmogony and even of geology, from Moses to Thales, and from Thales to Werner. This assumption originates in the same law of mind that gave rise to the _prima materia_ of the Peripatetic school. In order to _comprehend_ and _explain_ the _forms_ of things, we must imagine a state _antecedent_ to form. A chaos of heterogeneous substances, such as our Milton has described, is not only an _impossible_ state (for this may be equally true of every other attempt), but it is _palpably_ impossible. It presupposes, moreover, the thing it is intended to solve; and makes _that_ an _effect_ which had been called in as the explanatory _cause_. The requisite and only serviceable fiction, therefore, is the representation of CHAOS as one vast homogeneous drop! In this sense it may be even justified, as an appropriate symbol of the great fundamental truth that all things spring from, and subsist in, the endless strife between indifference and difference. The whole history of Nature is comprised in the specification of the transitional states from the one to the other. The symbol only is fictitious: the thing signified is not only grounded in truth--it is the law and actuating principle of all other truths, whether physical or intellectual.
Now, by magnetism in its widest sense, I mean the first and simplest _differential_ act of Nature, as the power which works in _length_, and produces the first distinction between the indistinguishable by the generation of a _line_. Relatively, therefore, to fluidity, that is, to matter, the parts of which cannot be distinguished from each other by figure, magnetism is the power of fixity; but, relatively to itself, magnetism, like every other power in Nature, is designated by its opposite poles, and must be represented as the magnetic axis, the northern pole of which signifies rest, attraction, fixity, coherence, or hardness; the element of EARTH in the nomenclature of _observation_ and the CARBONIC principle in that of _experiment_; while the southern pole, as its antithesis, represents mobility, repulsion, incoherence, and fusibility; the element of air in the nomenclature of observation (that is, of Nature as it appears to us when unquestioned by art), and azote or nitrogen in the nomenclature of experiment (that is, of Nature in the state so beautifully allegorized in the Homeric fable of Proteus bound down, and forced to answer by Ulysses, after having been pursued through all his metamorphoses into his ultimate form.(14)) That nothing real does or can exist corresponding to either pole _exclusively_, is involved in the very definition of a THING as the synthesis of opposing energies. That a thing _is_, is owing to the co-inherence therein of any two powers; but that it is _that_ particular thing arises from the proportions in which these powers are co-present, either as predominance or as reciprocal neutralization; but under the modification of twofold power to which magnetism itself is, as the thesis to its antithesis.