ys: in the striving for
development on the part of every product, in the preservation of the genus
amid the disappearance of individuals, in the endlessness of the series of
products. Nature's creative impulse is inexhaustible, it transcends every
product. Qualities are points of arrest in the one universal force of
nature; all nature is a connected development. Because of the opposition in
the nature-ground between the stimulating and the retarding activity, the
law of duality everywhere rules. To these two forces, however, still a
third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation
or measure of their connection. This is the source of the threefold
division of the Philosophy of Nature. The magnet with its union of opposite
polar forces is the type of all configuration in nature.

With Fichte's synthetic method and Herder's naturalistic principles
Schelling combines Kantian ideas, especially Kant's dynamism (matter is
a force-product),[1] and his view of the organic (organisms are
self-productive beings, and are regarded by us as ends in themselves,
because of the interaction between their members and the whole). The three
organic functions sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, on the other
hand, Schelling took from Kielmeyer, whose address _On the Relations of
the Organic Forces_, 1793, excited great attention. The concept of life is
dominant in Schelling's theory of nature. The organic is more original than
the inorganic; the latter must be explained from the former; that which is
dead must be considered as a product of departing life. No less erroneous
than the theory of a magic vital force is the mechanical interpretation,
which looks on life merely as a chemical phenomenon. The dead, mechanical
and chemical, forces are merely the negative conditions of life; to them
there must be added as a positive force a vital stimulus external to the
individual, which continually rekindles the conflict between the opposing
activities on which the vital process depends. Life consists, that is, in
the perpetual prevention of the equilibrium which is the object of the
chemical process. This constant disturbance proceeds from "universal
nature," which, as the common principle of organic and inorganic nature, as
that which determines them for each other, which founds a pre-established
harmony between them, deserves the name of the world-soul. Schelling
thus recognizes a threefold nature: organized, inorga