When man in the state of world-onlooker undertook to form a dynamic picture of the nature of matter, it was inevitable that of all the qualities which belong to its existence he should be able to envisage only those pertaining to gravity and electricity. Because his consciousness, at this stage of its evolution, was closely bound up with the force of gravity inherent in the human body, he was unable to form any conception of levity as a force opposite to gravity. Yet, nature is built bipolarically, and polarity-concepts are therefore indispensable for developing a true understanding of her actions. This accounts for the fact that the unipolar concept of gravity had eventually to be supplemented by some kind of bipolar concept. Now, the only sphere of nature-phenomena with a bipolar character accessible to the onlooker-consciousness 'was that of electricity. It was thus that man in this state of consciousness was compelled to picture the foundation of the physical universe as being made up of gravity and electricity, as we meet them in the modern picture of the atom, with its heavy electro-positive nucleus and the virtually weightless electro-negative electrons moving round it. Once scientific observation and thought are freed from the limitations of the onlooker-consciousness, both gravity and electricity appear in a new perspective, though the change is different for each of them. Gravity, while it becomes one pole of a polarity, with levity as the opposite pole, still retains its character as a fundamental force of the physical universe, the gravity-levity polarity being one of the first order. Not so electricity. For, as the following discussion will show, the electrical polarity is one of the second order; moreover, instead of constituting matter as is usually believed, electricity turns out to be in reality a product of matter. * We follow Goethe's line when, in order to answer the question, 'What is electricity?' we first ask, 'How does electricity arise?' Instead of starting with phenomena produced by electricity when it is already in action, and deriving from them a hypothetical picture, we begin by observing the processes to which electricity owes its appearance. Since there is significance in the historical order in which facts of nature have come to man's knowledge in the past, we choose as our starting-point, among the various modes of generating electricity, the one through which the existence of an electric force first became known. This is the rousing of the electric state in a body by rubbing it with another body of different material composition. Originally, amber was rubbed with wool or fur.