supposition. But my opinions will be best explained by a rapid exemplification in the processes of Nature, from the first rudiments of individualized life in the lowest classes of its two great poles, the vegetable and animal creation, to its crown and consummation in the human body; thus illustrating at once the unceasing _polarity of life, as the form of its process, and its tendency to progressive individuation as the law of its direction_. Among the conceptions, of the mere ideal character of which the philosopher is well aware, and which yet become necessary from the necessity of assuming a beginning; the original fluidity of the planet is the chief. Under some form or other it is expressed or implied in every system of cosmogony and even of geology, from Moses to Thales, and from Thales to Werner. This assumption originates in the same law of mind that gave rise to the _prima materia_ of the Peripatetic school. In order to _comprehend_ and _explain_ the _forms_ of things, we must imagine a state _antecedent_ to form. A chaos of heterogeneous substances, such as our Milton has described, is not only an _impossible_ state (for this may be equally true of every other attempt), but it is _palpably_ impossible. It presupposes, moreover, the thing it is intended to solve; and makes _that_ an _effect_ which had been called in as the explanatory _cause_. The requisite and only serviceable fiction, therefore, is the representation of CHAOS as one vast homogeneous drop! In this sense it may be even justified, as an appropriate symbol of the great fundamental truth that all things spring from, and subsist in, the endless strife between indifference and difference. The whole history of Nature is comprised in the specification of the transitional states from the one to the other. The symbol only is fictitious: the thing signified is not only grounded in truth—it is the law and actuating principle of all other truths, whether physical or intellectual.