In this way we have brought the reader as far as the problem of the fourth section of the Outlines, and we leave him to find in it for himself the solution along with the corollaries which it brings up.—Meanwhile, we shall endeavor to indicate how the deduced product would necessarily appear from the stand-point of reflection.
The product is the synthesis wherein the opposite extremes meet, which on the one side are designated by the absolutely decomposible—on the other as indecomposible.—How continuity comes into the absolute discontinuity with which he sets out, the atomic philosopher endeavors to explain by means of cohesive, plastic power, &c., &c. In vain, for continuity is only productivity itself.
The manifoldness of the forms which such product assumes in its metamorphosis was explained by the difference in the stages of development, so that, parallel with every step of development, goes a particular form. The atomic philosopher posits in nature certain fundamental forms, and as in it everything strives after form, and every thing which does form itself has also its particular form, so the fundamental forms must be conceded, but certainly only as indicated in nature, not as actually existent.
From the standpoint of reflection, the becoming of this product must appear as a continual striving of the original actions toward the production of a determinate form, and a continual recancelling of those forms.
Thus, the product would not be product of a simple tendency; it would be only the visible expression of an internal proportion, of an internal equipoise of the original actions, which neither reduce themselves mutually to absolute formlessness, nor yet, by reason of the universal conflict, allow the production of a determinate and fixed form.
Hitherto (so long as we have had to deal merely with ideal factors), there have been opposite directions of investigation possible; from this point, inasmuch as we have to pursue a real product in its developments, there is only one direction.
(η) By the unavoidable separation of productivity into opposite directions at every single step of development the product itself is separated into individual products, by which, however, for that very reason, only different stages of development are marked.
That this is so may be shown either in the products themselves, as is done when we compare them with each other with regard to their form, and search out a continuity of formation—an idea which, from the fact that continuity is never in the products (for the reflection), but always only in the productivity, can never be perfectly realized.
In order to find continuity in productivity, the successive steps of the transition of productivity into product must be more clearly exhibited than they have hitherto been. From the fact that the productivity gets limited, (v. supra,) we have in the first instance only the start for a product, only the fixed point for the productivity generally. It must be shown how the productivity gradually materializes itself, and changes itself into products ever more and more fixed, so as to produce a dynamical scale in nature, and this is the real subject of the fundamental problem of the whole system.
In advance, the following may serve to throw light on the subject. In the first place, a dualization of the productivity is demanded; the cause through which this dualization is effected remains in the first instance altogether outside of the investigation. By dualization a change of contraction and expansion is perhaps conditioned. This change is not something in matter, but is matter itself, and the first stage of productivity passing over into product. Product cannot be reached except through a stoppage of this change, that is, through a third [somewhat] which fixes that change itself, and thus matter in its lowest stage—in the first power—would be an object of intuition; that change would be seen in rest, or in equipoise, just as, conversely again, by the suppression of the third [somewhat] matter might be raised to a higher power. Now it might be possible that those products just deduced stood upon quite different degrees of materiality, or of that transition, or that those different degrees were more or less distinguishable in the one than in the other; that is, a dynamical scale of those products would thereby have to be demonstrated.