PHYSIOLOGY OF LIFE. 



his metamorphoses into his ultimate form. 1 ) That nothing 

 real does or can exist corresponding to either pole exclu- 

 sively, is involved in the very definition of a THING as the 

 synthesis of opposing energies. That a thing is, is owing 

 to the co-inherence therein of any two powers ; but that 

 it is that particular thing arises from the proportions in 

 which these powers are co-present, either as predominance 

 or as reciprocal neutralization; but under the modification 

 of twofold power to which magnetism itself is, as the thesis 

 to its antithesis. 



The correspondent, in the world of the senses, to the 

 magnetic axis, exists in the series of metals. The metal- 

 leity, as the universal base of the planet, is a necessary 

 deduction from the principles of the system. From the 

 infusible, though evaporable, diamond to nitrogen itself, 

 the metallic nature of which has been long suspected by 

 chemists, though still under the mistaken notion of an 

 oxyde, we trace a series of metals from the maximum of 

 coherence to positive fluidity, in all ordinary temperatures, 

 we mean. Though, in point of fact, cold itself is but a 

 superinduction of the one pole, or, what amounts to the 

 same thing, the subtraction of the other, under the modi- 

 fications afore described; and therefore are the metals 

 indecomposible, because they are themselves the decom- 

 positions of the metallic axis, in all its degrees of longitude 

 and latitude. Thus the substance of the planet from which 

 it is, is metallic ; while that which is ever becoming, is in 



1 Such is the interpretation given by Lord Bacon. To which of the two 

 gigantic intellects, the poet's or philosophic commentator's, the allegory be- 

 longs, I shall not presume to decide. Its extraordinary beauty and appro- 

 priateness remains the same in either case. 



