In this way it will become increasingly clear that in levity we have to do with something which, despite its manifesting characteristics of a 'force' not unlike gravity and thereby resembling the latter, differs essentially from anything purely physical. It is only by its interactions with gravity that levity brings about events in the physical world-events, however, which are themselves partly of a physical, partly of a superphysical kind. Seeing things in this aspect, we are naturally prompted to ask what causes there are in the world which make gravity and levity interact at all. This question will find its answer in due course. First, we must make ourselves more fully acquainted with the various appearances of the gravity-levity interplay in nature. 1 In this sense Ruskin's description of the working of the spirit in the plant as one that 'catches from chaos water, etc., etc., and fastens them into a given form' points to magical action. 2 For Van Helmont, owing to the Flemish pronunciation of the letter G, the two words sounded more alike than their spelling suggests. 3 In a later chapter we shall have opportunity to determine what distinguishes Air from Fire, on the one hand, and Water from Earth on the other. 4 It is this apparent uni-polarity of gravity which has given Professor Einstein so much trouble in his endeavour to create a purely gravitational world-picture with bipolar electricity and magnetism fitting into it mathematically. 5 See the 'Bishop Barnes' controversy of recent date. 6 To the same category belong the mighty thunderstorms which in some parts of the world are known to occur in conjunction with earthquakes. 7 See Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann (translated by J. Oxenford), 13th November, 1823. CHAPTER X The Fourth State of Matter When William Crookes chose as one of the titles of his paper on the newly discovered properties of electricity, 'The Fourth State of Matter', it was to express his belief that he had found a state of matter, additional to the three known ones, which represented 'the borderland where matter and force seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between known and unknown' for which his soul had been longing ever since the death of his beloved brother.1 All that has followed from his discovery, down to the transformation of matter itself into freely working energy, shows that he was right in thinking he had reached some borderland of nature. But the character of the forces which are thus liberated makes it equally clear that this is not the borderland he was looking for. Nature - by which we mean physical nature - has in fact two borders, one touching the realm of the intramaterial energies which are liberated by disrupting the structure of atomic nuclei, the other leading over into creative Chaos, the fountain-head of all that appears in nature as intelligent design.