ensities of Life to consist in the
progressive realization of this tendency. The power which is acknowledged
to exist, wherever the realization is found, must subsist wherever the
tendency is manifested. The power which comes forth and stirs abroad in
the bird, must be latent in the egg. I have shown, moreover, that this
tendency to individuate cannot be conceived without the opposite tendency
to connect, even as the centrifugal power supposes the centripetal, or as
the two opposite poles constitute each other, and are the constituent acts
of one and the same power in the magnet. We might say that the life of the
magnet subsists in their union, but that it lives (acts or manifests
itself) in their strife. Again, if the tendency be at once to individuate
and to connect, to detach, but so as either to retain or to reproduce
attachment, the individuation itself must be a tendency to the ultimate
production of the highest and most comprehensive individuality. This must
be the one great end of Nature, her ultimate object, or by whatever other
word we may designate that something which bears to a final cause the same
relation that Nature herself bears to the Supreme Intelligence.

* * * * *

According to the plan I have prescribed for this inquisition, we are now
to seek for the highest law, or most general form, under which this
tendency acts, and then to pursue the same process with this, as we have
already done with the tendency itself, namely, having stated the law in
its highest abstraction, to present it in the different forms in which it
appears and reappears in higher and higher dignities. I restate the
question. The tendency having been ascertained, what is its most general
law? I answer--_polarity_, or the essential dualism of Nature, arising out
of its productive unity, and still tending to reaffirm it, either as
equilibrium, indifference, or identity. In its _productive power_, of
which the product is the only measure, consists its incompatibility with
mathematical calculus. For the full applicability of an abstract science
ceases, the moment reality begins.(12) Life, then, we consider as the
copula, or the unity of thesis and antithesis, position and
counterposition,--Life itself being the positive of both; as, on the other
hand, the two counterpoints are the necessary conditions of the
_manifestations_ of Life. These, by the same necessity, unite in a
synthesis; which again, by th