e law of dualism, essential to all actual
existence, expands, or _produces_ itself, from the point into the _line_,
in order again to converge, as the initiation of the same productive
process in some intenser form of reality. Thus, in the identity of the two
counter-powers, Life _sub_sists; in their strife it _con_sists: and in
their reconciliation 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 demonstrate, 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,
and have their being; while the equal mystery of _Time_ bears the same
relation to his _Eternity_, or what is fully equivalent, his Unity.

Physiologically contemplated, Nature begins, proceeds, and ends in a
contradiction; for the moment of absolute solution would be that in which
Nature would cease to be Nature, _i.e._ a scheme of ever-varying
relations; and physiology, in the ambitious attempt to solve phenomena
into absolute realities, would itself become a mere web of verbal
abstractions.

But it is in strict connexion with our subject, that we should make the
universal FORMS as well as the not less universal LAW of Life, clear and
intelligible in the example of _Time_ and _Space_, these being both the
first specification of the principle, and ever after its indispensable
symbols. First, a single act of self-inquiry will show the impossibility
of distinctly conceiving the one without some involution of the other;
either time expressed in space, in the form of the mathematical line, or
space within time, as in the circle. But to form the first conception of a
_real_ thing, we state both as one in the idea, _duration_. The formula
is: (A=B+B=A)=(A=A) or the