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 savant’s mind that he feels a tendency, as spontane- 
