According to the plan I have prescribed for this inquisition, we are now to seek for the highest law, or most general form, under which this tendency acts, and then to pursue the same process with this, as we have already done with the tendency itself, namely, having stated the law in its highest abstraction, to present it in the different forms in which it appears and reappears in higher and higher dignities. I restate the question. The tendency having been ascertained, what is its most general law? I answer--_polarity_, or the essential dualism of Nature, arising out of its productive unity, and still tending to reaffirm it, either as equilibrium, indifference, or identity. In its _productive power_, of which the product is the only measure, consists its incompatibility with mathematical calculus. For the full applicability of an abstract science ceases, the moment reality begins.(12) Life, then, we consider as the copula, or the unity of thesis and antithesis, position and counterposition,--Life itself being the positive of both; as, on the other hand, the two counterpoints are the necessary conditions of the _manifestations_ of Life. These, by the same necessity, unite in a synthesis; which again, by the law of dualism, essential to all actual existence, expands, or _produces_ itself, from the point into the _line_, in order again to converge, as the initiation of the same productive process in some intenser form of reality. Thus, in the identity of the two counter-powers, Life _sub_sists; in their strife it _con_sists: and in their reconciliation it at once dies and is born again into a new form, either falling back into the life of the whole, or starting anew in the process of individuation.
Whence shall we take our beginning? From Space, _istud litigium philosophorum_, which leaves the mind equally dissatisfied, whether we deny or assert its real existence. To make it wholly ideal, would be at the same time to idealize all phenomena, and to undermine the very conception of an external world. To make it real, would be to assert the existence of something, with the properties of nothing. It would far transcend the height to which a physiologist must confine his flights, should we attempt to reconcile this apparent contradiction. It is the duty and the privilege of the theologian to demonstrate, that _space_ is the ideal organ by which the soul of man perceives the _omnipresence_ of the Supreme Reality, as distinct from the works, which in him move, and live, and have their being; while the equal mystery of _Time_ bears the same relation to his _Eternity_, or what is fully equivalent, his Unity.