PHYSIOLOGY OF LIFE. 47 



the ingot of gold expressed life, I should answer without 

 hesitation, as the ingot of gold assuredly not, for its form 

 is accidental and ab extra. It may be added to or de- 

 tracted from without in the least affecting the nature, 

 state, or properties in the specific matter of which the 

 ingot consists. But as gold, as that special union of ab- 

 solute and of relative gravity, ductility, and hardness, which, 

 wherever they are found, constitute gold, I should answer 

 no less fearlessly, in the affirmative. But I should further 

 add, that of the two counteracting tendencies of nature, 

 namely, that of detachment from the universal life, which 

 universality is represented to us by gravitation, and that 

 of attachment or reduction into it, this and the other noble 

 metals represented the units in which the latter tendency, 

 namely, that of identity with the life of nature, subsisted 

 in the greatest overbalance over the former. It is the 

 form of unity with the least degree of tendency to 

 individuation. 



Rising in the ascent, I should take, as illustrative of 

 the second step, the various forms of crystals as a union, 

 not of powers only, but of parts, and as the simplest forms 

 of composition in the next narrowest sphere of affinity. 

 Here the form, or apparent quantity, is manifestly the 

 result of the quality, and the chemist himself not seldom 

 admits them as infallible characters of the substances 

 united in the whole of a given crystal. 



In the first step, we had Life, as the mere unity of 

 powers ; in the second we have the simplest forms of 

 totality evolved. The third step is presented to us in 

 those vast formations, the tracing of which generically 

 would form the science of Geology, or its history in the 



