Other writers have preferred the ideas of Kepler, and, like that great astronomer, have considered the globe itself as possessed of vital faculties. According to them a vital fluid circulates in it; a process of assimilation goes on in it, as well as in animated bodies; every particle of it is alive; it possesses instinct and volition, even to the most elementary molecules, which attract and repel each other according to sympathies and antipathies. Each kind of mineral has the power of converting immense masses into its own nature, as we convert our food into flesh and blood. The mountains are the respiratory organs of the globe, and the schists its organs of secretion; it is by these latter that it decomposes the water of the sea, in order to produce the matters ejected by volcanoes. The veins are carious sores, abscesses of the mineral kingdom; and the metals are products of rottenness and disease, which is the reason that almost all of them have so bad a smell[23].
More recently still, a philosophy, which substitutes metaphor for reasoning, and proceeds on the system of absolute identity or of pantheism, attributes the production of all phenomena, or which, in the eyes of its supporters, is the same thing, all beings, to polarization, such as is manifested by the two electricities; and denominating every kind of opposition or difference, whether of situation, of nature, or of function, by the title of Polarisation, opposes to each other, in the first place, God and the universe; then, in the universe, the sun and the planets; next, in each planet, the solid and the liquid; and, pursuing this course, changing its figures and allegories according to its necessities, at length arrives at the last details of organic species[24].
It must, however, be observed, that these are what may be termed extreme examples, and that all geologists have not carried the extravagance of their conceptions to such a length as those which we have just cited. Yet, among those who have proceeded with more caution, and have not searched for geological causes beyond the limits of physical and chemical science, much diversity and contradiction still prevail.
Diversities of all the Systems.
According to one system, every thing has been successively precipitated by crystallization, and deposited nearly as it exists at present; but the sea, which covered all, has gradually retired[25].
According to another, the materials of which the mountains consist, are incessantly worn down and carried off by the rivers to be deposited at the bottom of the sea, where they are heated under an enormous pressure, and form strata, which are one day to be violently lifted up by the heat which consolidates them[26].
A third supposes the fluid divided into a multitude of lakes, placed, like the seats of an amphitheatre, above each other, which, after having deposited our shelly strata, have successively broken their dikes, to descend and fill the basin of the ocean[27].
According to a fourth, tides of seven or eight hundred fathoms depth have carried off, from time to time, the matter lying at the bottom of the sea, and have thrown it, in the form of mountains and hills, upon the original valleys or plains of the continent[28].