52 PHYSIOLOGY OF LIFE. 







conciliation 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 demon- 

 strate, 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, 



duce to the distances or impacts of atoms, under the assumptions of two 

 powers, which are themselves declared to be no more than mere general 

 terms for those quantities of motion and impact (the atom itself being a 

 fiction formed by abstraction, and in truth a third occult quality for the 

 purpose of explaining hardness and density), amounts to an attempt to 

 destroy chemistry itself, and at the same time to exclude the sole reality anc 

 only positive contents of the very science into which that of chemistry is to 

 be degraded. Now what qualities are to chemistry, productiveness is to the 

 science of Life ; and this being excluded, physiology or zoonomy would sink 

 into chemistry, chemistry by the same process into mechanics, while me- 

 chanics themselves would lose the substantial principle, which, bending the 

 lower extreme towards its apex, produces the organic circle of the sciences 

 and elevates them all into different arcs or stations of the one absolute 

 science of Life. 



This explanation, which in appearance only is a digression, was indis- 

 pensably requisite to prevent the idea of polarity, which has been given as the 

 universal law of Life, from being misunderstood as a mere refinement on 

 those mechanical systems of physiology, which it has been my main object to 

 explode. 



