[4] See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 392.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND IDEALISM.
What is meant by a 'philosophy of Nature'? 'To philosophise on Nature,' says Schelling, 'means to lift it up out of the dead mechanism in which it appears immersed,—to inspire it, so to speak, with liberty, and to set it in free process of evolution: it means, in other words, to tear ourselves away from the vulgar view which sees in Nature only occurrences, or at the best sees the action as a fact, not the action itself in the action[1].' There is in short a process in nature parallel in character to what Fichte had exhibited for consciousness. The natural world is no longer subordinated, but to appearance co-ordinate: and evolution or development, exhibited under the logical title of a 'deduction,' is the common law of both. The real order and the ideal order of the world are equally the work of an infinite and unconditioned activity, 'which never quite exhausts itself in any finite product, and of which everything individual is only as it were a particular expression.' The nature which we see broken up in groups and masses, and individual objects, is to be explained as a series of steps in a process of development: the steps in a single continuous product which has been arrested at several stages,—which presents distinct epochs, but nevertheless all approximations, with divergences, to a single original ideal.
In Nature, as in Mind, the most typical phenomenon is an original heterogeneity, duplicity, or difference, which, however, points back to a still more fundamental homogeneity, unity, or identity. This primary unity or ground of unification does not indeed appear to sight; the 'soul of Nature,' the anima mundi, nowhere presents itself as such in its undivided simplicity; but only as the perpetually recurring re-union of what has been divided. But though unapparent, the absolute identity is the necessary presupposition of all life and existence, as of all knowledge and action. It is the link or 'copula' which perpetually reduces the antithesis to unity, and the heterogeneity to homogeneity, and the different to redintegration. To this fact of antithesis, presupposing and continually reverting to an original unity, Schelling gives the name 'Polarity,' 'It is impossible to construe the main physical phenomena without such a conflict of opposite principles. But this conflict only exists at the instant of the phenomenon itself. Each natural force awakes its opposite. But that force has no independent existence: it only exists in this contest, and it is only this contest which gives it for the moment a separate existence. As soon as this contest ceases, the force vanishes, by retreating into the sphere of homogeneous forces[2].' Polarity, therefore, is a general law of the cosmos.
A ceaseless, limitless activity, therefore, as the basis or groundwork of all, for ever crossing, arresting, and limiting itself: an eternal war, which, however, is always being led back to peace,—a process of differentiation which rests upon, is the product of, and is for ever forced back to integration, is the perpetual rhythm of the natural universe. It is a process in which can be traced three grades, stages, or 'powers' (first, second, and third, &c.). By its more generally descriptive name it is called Organisation. 'Organism,' says Schelling, 'is the principle of things. It is not a property of single natural objects; but, on the contrary, single natural objects are so many limitations, or single modes of apprehending the universal organism[3].' 'The world is an organisation; and a universal organism itself is the condition (and to that extent the positive) of mechanism[4].' 'Mechanism is to be explained from organism: not organism from mechanism.' 'The essential of all things is life: the accidental is only the kind of their life: and even the dead in Nature is not utterly dead,—it is only extinct life.'
But if the conception of an organism be thus the adequate or complete idea of Nature as a whole, that idea is only realised as a third 'power' supervening on, and by means of two subordinate or inferior ranges or 'powers.' The first stage is that occupied by the mathematical and mechanical conception of the world,—the bare skeleton or framework which has to be clothed upon and informed with life and growth. This first 'power' in the world-process of antithetical forces, under the control of, and on the basis supplied by, the original thetic unity which synthetises them, is Matter. In Matter we have the equilibrium and statical indifference of two opposing forces—one centrifugal, accelerating, repulsive, the other contripetal, retarding, attractive—which, working under the synthetising unity supplied by the force of universal gravitation, build up in their momentary arrests or epochs the various material forms. In this first 'power' we have as it were the scheme or machinery through which organisation will work: the outward and 'abstract, organism. And the essential feature of this 'construction' or 'deduction' of matter is that it does not take material atoms and build them into a world, but 'deduces' the properties of matter as issuing from the play of opposing forces, and as due to the temporary syntheses resulting from the presence of unity making itself felt in the opposites.
A second and higher 'power' is seen in the physical universe as it presents, itself to the sciences of electricity, magnetism, and chemistry. If the former briefly be denominated the mechanical, this is the chemical world. The law of polarity is here especially prominent: the neutrality or indifference of parts is replaced by an intenser antithesis and affinity: and the return from heterogeneity to homogeneity takes place with more striking and even sudden effect. Here, matter, even as inorganised, has a certain simulacrum of life and sensibility: there is in it the trace of a spirit which emerges above the mere contiguity and juxtaposition of mechanical atoms. The atomic theory shows itself less and less adequate as an attempt to represent the whole phenomena of inanimate matter, and the material universe is already charged with sympathies and antipathies which are full of the promise and the potency of the organic world.