The reason for this uncertainty is that the physical conditions in the sphere where lightning occurs, according to other experiences of electric phenomena, actually exclude the formation of such high tensions as are necessary for the occurrence of discharges on the scale of lightning. If we look at this fact without scientific bias we are once again reminded of the Hans Andersen child. We cannot help wondering how this child would behave in a physics class if the teacher, after vainly trying to produce a lightning-flash in miniature with the help of an electrical machine, explained that the moisture prevalent in the air was responsible for the failure of the experiment, and that he would have to postpone it to a day when the air was drier. It would scarcely escape the Hans Andersen child that the conditions announced by the teacher as unfavourable to the production of an electric spark by the machine, prevail in a much higher degree exactly where lightning, as a supposed electric spark, actually does occur. To conclude from the presence of electric tensions in the earth's atmosphere as an accompaniment of lightning, in the way first observed by Franklin, that lightning itself is an electrical process, is to be under the same kind of illusion that led men to attribute electrical characteristics to the human soul because its activity in the body was found to be accompanied by electrical processes in the latter. The identification of lightning with the electric spark is a case of a confusion between the upper and lower boundaries of nature, characteristic of the onlooker-consciousness. As such, it has stood in the way of a real understanding both of non-electrical natural phenomena and of electricity itself. What we observe in lightning is really an instantaneous execution of a process which runs its course continually in the atmosphere, quietly and unnoticed. It is the process by which water reverts from the imponderable to the ponderable condition, after having been converted to the former through levity set in action by the sun (as usually happens in a high degree just before a thunderstorm). We form a true picture of the course of a storm if we say that nature enables us to witness a sublime display of the sudden bringing to birth of matter in earthbound form. What falls to the ground as rain (or hail) is substantially identical with what was perceptible to the eye, a moment before, as a majestic light-phenomenon. The accompanying electrical occurrence is the appropriate counter-event at nature's lower boundary. Since the two form part of a larger whole they necessarily occur together; but the electrical occurrence must not be identified with the event in the heavens. The reason for their conjunction will become clear later, when we shall show how electrical polarity arises from the polarity between gravity and levity.