12. That there is, in the history of Science, much which easily lends itself to such a formula, the views which I have endeavoured to expound, show and exemplify in detail. But yet the attempts to carry this view into detail by conjecture--by a sort of divination--with little or no attention to the historical progress and actual condition of knowledge, (and such are those which have been made by the philosophers whom I have mentioned,) have led to arbitrary and baseless views of almost every branch of knowledge. Such oppositions and differences as are found to exist in nature, are assumed as the representatives of the elements of necessary antitheses, in a manner in which scientific truth and inductive reasoning are altogether slighted. Thus, this peculiar and necessary antithetical character is assumed to be displayed in attraction and repulsion, in centripetal and centrifugal forces, in a supposed positive and negative electricity, in a supposed positive and negative magnetism; in still more doubtful positive and negative elements of light and heat; in the different elements of the atmosphere, which are, quite groundlessly, assumed to have a peculiar antithetical character: in animal and vegetable life: in the two sexes; in gravity and light. These and many others, are given by Schelling, as instances of the radical opposition of forces and elements which necessarily pervades all nature. I conceive that the heterogeneous and erroneous principles involved in these views of the material world show us how unsafe and misleading is the philosophical assumption on which they rest. And the Triads of Hegel, consisting of Thesis, Antithesis, and Union, are still more at variance with all sound science. Thus we are told that matter and motion are determined as _inertia_, _impulsion_, _fall_; that Absolute Mechanics determines itself as _centripetal force_, _centrifugal force_, _universal gravitation_. Light, it is taught, is a secondary determination of matter. Light is the most intimate element of nature, and might be called _the Me_ of nature: it is limited by what we may call negative light, which is darkness.