Wherever Nature loses itself in formlessness, productivity exhausts itself in it. (This is what we express when we talk of a becoming latent.)—Conversely, wherever the form predominates—i. e. wherever the productivity is limited—the productivity manifests itself; it appears, not as a (representable) product, but as productivity, although passing over into one product, as in the phenomena of heat. (The idea of imponderables is only a symbolic one.)
(β) If productivity passes into formlessness, then, objectively considered, it is the absolutely formless.
The boldness of the atomical system has been very imperfectly comprehended. The idea which prevails in it, of an absolutely formless [somewhat] everywhere incapable of manifestation as determinate matter, is nothing other than the symbol of nature approximating to productivity.—The nearer to productivity the nearer to formlessness.
(γ) Productivity appears as productivity only when limits are set to it.
That which is everywhere and in everything, is, for that very reason, nowhere.—Productivity is fixed only by limitation.—Electricity exists only at that point at which limits are given, and it is only a poverty of conception that would look for anything else in its phenomena beyond the phenomena of (limited) productivity.—The condition of light is an antithesis in the electric and galvanic, as well as in the chemical, process, and even light which comes to us without our coöperation (the phenomenon of productivity exerted all round by the sun) presupposes that antithesis.[[22]]
(δ) It is only limited productivity that gives the start to product. (The explanation of product must begin at the origination of the fixed point at which the start is made.) The condition of all formation is duality. (This is the more profound signification that lies in Kant’s construction of matter from opposite forces.)
Electrical phenomena are the general scheme for the construction of matter universally.
(ε) In Nature, neither pure productivity nor pure product can ever be arrived at.
The former is the negation of all product, the latter the negation of all productivity.
(Approximation to the former is the absolutely decomposible, to the latter the absolutely indecomposible, of the atomistics. The former cannot be thought without, at the same time, being the absolutely incomposible, the latter without, at the same time, being the absolutely composible.)