256 THE WORLD-EKERGY 



Centrality in the world of external forms, let us remem- 

 ber, is energy directed toward a given point. It is itself, 

 therefore, a tendency toward the annulment of the ex- 

 tended. For the strain toward the center manifest in 

 the external is in reality a tendency toward the annulment 

 of externality. And this is but to state in its dialectic 

 form the conception often repeated that, were attraction 

 to act without restraint,, it must concentrate all matter in 

 a point. In other words> it must reduce the extended to 

 the non-extended. 



The abstractness of such view is thus rendered appar- 

 ent. In all genuine reality there is necessarily action 

 and reaction. Either phase without the other, as already 

 sufficiently shown, must be wholly impossible. 



At the same time centrality, however abstract a char- 

 acteristic when taken simply by itself, is still an essential 

 phase of every specialized unit. In its simplest form it is 

 external internality. The parts of an extended unit are 

 grouped around the center. They are therefore side by 

 side with and thus external to the center; whence, con- 

 versely, the center, considered in relation to the parts 

 singly, is also external to them. 



Thus the purely physical center has, after all, no true 

 internality of which, as already remarked, the world in 

 space, as such, affords absolutely no genuine instance. 

 And yet, at the same time, the center of an object in 

 space shows the first phase of tendency in the external 

 toward internality; though in the object, as physical 

 object merely, the tendency must of course remain 

 unrealized. 



In affinity, on the other hand, the external already ex- 

 hibits a true phase of internality. The elements entering 



