56 NATURE AND LIFE. 



which those sciences have gained a wholly new character : 

 we allude to those logical formulas into which the mind 

 condenses the materials of knowledge, those synthetic ideas 

 which are the summary of grand inductions. After having 

 shown how we must conceive of mind in Nature, we should 

 point out how it is necessary to conceive Nature in mind, 

 for our sensations, in undergoing elaboration by the mind 

 in order to become knowledge, borrow, and borrow very 

 much, from the peculiarities of the spiritual essence. In- 

 tellectual processes, says Charles Robin, form a whole with 

 the rest of science, in such a way that history proves the 

 exposition of a general idea to be proper, and to be ad- 

 missible as equivalent or superior to the exposition of 

 facts. 



What, then, are these intellectual processes, these gen- 

 eral ideas ? These processes may be briefly stated as dia- 

 lectics, either synthetic or intuitive, and these ideas as the 

 concepts about form and force, of which we proceed to 

 point out the chief ones. The idea of series is perhaps the 

 most important. In contemplating mineral or chemical 

 species, or in contemplating animal or vegetable species, 

 the mind arranges them in a series. That is the form un- 

 der which it conceives the totality of beings. It sets up a 

 continuity among them, resembling that of series in the 

 higher algebra. It ranges forces and qualities in an un- 

 broken graduated progression, the effective cause of which 

 is perfection, in this sense, that beings rise to a higher 

 point in the scale just in the degree of their approach to 

 the conditions of that which is perfect, to wit, intelligence. 

 So luminous is this order, that Gerhardt effected a magnifi- 

 cent renovation in recent chemistry by bringing into it 

 the idea of series. The real relations and the true charac- 

 teristics of bodies have been settled with new exactness 

 by that method. This conception stamps itself so forcibly 

 on the savantfs mind that he feels a tendency, as spontane- 



