It is on this side that a certain analogy of Hegel's and Schelling's philosophy of nature with the Romantic school comes out. Nature is felt, as it were, to be spirit-haunted, to give glimpses of a solidarity, a design, a providentiality, which runs counter to that general outward indifference in which part seems to have settled beside part, each utterly indifferent to the other. Romance is the unexpected coincidence, the sudden jumping together of what seemed set worlds apart and utterly alien. It was the sense of this Romance which wove its wild legends of nymph and cobold, of faun and river-god, of imp and fairy, wielding the powers of the elements and guiding the life of even the so-called inanimate world. But it is no less the theme of the fairy tale of science. Even in the austere demonstrations of geometry, and the constructions of mechanics, the un-looked-for slips upon us with gipsy tread. Who has not--in his early studies of mathematics--been fain to marvel at the almost unexpected consilience of property with property in a figure, suddenly placing in almost 'eery' relief the conjunction of what was apparently poles asunder? It is not a mere form of words to speak of beautiful properties of a conic section or a curve. Custom perhaps has blunted our sense for the symmetries of celestial dynamics, but they are none the less admirable, because we are otherwise engrossed. To the first generation of our century the phenomena of chemistry, magnetism and electricity appealed--as they have never since done--with a tangible demonstration of that _appetitus ad invicem,_ that instinct of union Bacon speaks of; and this time in a higher form than in mere mechanism. Polarity--the bifurcation of reality into a pair of opposites which yet sought their complement in each other--eternally dividing only eternally to unite, and thus only to exist--became a process pressed into general service. Lastly, what more admirable than that adaptation of the individual to the environment--and of the environment to the individual--of the organs in him to his total, and of his total to his organs. One in all and All in one: one life in perpetual transformation, animals, plants, and earth and air; one organism, developing in absolute coherence. This was the vision which the genius of Schelling and his contemporaries saw--the same vision which, by accumulation of facts and pictorial history, Darwin and his disciples have impressed in some measure even on the dullest.