[50]. Proof—All dynamical phenomena are phenomena of transition from difference to indifference. But it is in this very transition that matter is primarily constructed.
[51]. In the already mentioned discourse on Faraday’s latest discovery, the author cites the passage (p. 75, original edition,) as well as § 56 sq. of the General View of the Dynamical Process (likewise written before the invention of the voltaic pile,) as a proof of his having anticipated the discoveries which proved the unity of the electrical and the chemical antithesis, and of the similar connection subsisting between magnetic and chemical phenomena. (See also Remark 2, p. 216.)
[52]. Every individual is an expression of the whole of Nature. As the existence of the single organic individual rests on that scale, so does the whole of Nature. Organic nature maintains the whole wealth and variety of her products only by continually changing the relation of those three functions.—In like manner inorganic Nature brings forth the whole wealth of her product, only by changing the relation of those three functions of matter ad infinitum; for magnetism, electricity, and chemical process are the functions of matter generally, and on that ground alone are they categories for the construction of all matter. This fact, that those three factors are not phenomena of special kinds of matter, but functions of all matter universally, gives its real, and its innermost sense to dynamical physics, which, by this circumstance alone, rises far above all other kinds of physics.
[53]. That is, the organic product can be thought only as subsisting under the hostile pressure of an external nature.
[54]. The chemical process, too, has not substrateless or simple factors; it has products for factors.
[55]. The same deduction is already given in the Outlines, p. 163.—What the dynamical action is, which according to the Outlines is also the cause of irritability, is now surely clear enough. It is the universal action which is everywhere conditioned by the cancelment of indifference, and which at last tends towards intussusception (indifference of products) when it is not continually prevented, as it is in the process of irritation. (Remark of the original.)
[56]. The abyss of forces, into which we here look down, opens with the one question; In the first construction of our earth, what can have been the ground of the fact that no genesis of new individuals is possible upon it, otherwise than under the condition of opposite powers? Compare an utterance of Kant on this subject, in his Anthropology. (Remark of the original.)
[57]. The two factors can never be one, but must be separated into different products—in order that thus the difference may be permanent.
[58]. In the product, indifference of the first and second powers is arrived at (for example, by irritation itself an origin of mass [i. e. indifference of the first order] and even chemical products [i. e. indifference of the second order] are reached), but indifference of the third power can never be reached, because it is a contradictory idea. (Remark of the original.)
[59]. The product is productive only from the fact of its being a product of the third power. But the idea of a productive product is itself a contradiction. What is productivity is not product, and what is product is not productivity. Therefore a product of the third power is itself a contradictory idea. From this even is manifest what an extremely artificial condition life is—wrenched, as it were, from Nature—subsisting against her will.