I have spoken so far as though Boehme traced the {180} source of every thing to _will and desire_, as though, in fact, the visible universe were the manifold outer expression of some deep-lying personal will, and in the last analysis that is true, but his more usual form of interpretation is that of the working of great structural _tendencies_, or _energies_, or "_qualities_," as he calls them, which are common both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again and again with painful reiteration, but with little advance of lucidity, seven of these fundamental laws or energies or qualities, like the sevenfold colour-band of the rainbow, though they can never be untangled or sundered or thought of as standing side by side, for together in their unity and interprocesses they form the universe, with its warp and woof of light and darkness.[25] The first "quality" is a contracting, compacting tendency which runs through the entire universe, outer and inner. It is in its inmost essence _desire_, the egoistic tendency, the focusing of will upon a definite aim so that consciousness contracts from its universal and absolute possibilities to a definite, limited, concrete _something in particular_, and thus negates everything else. Desire always disturbs the "Quiet" and brings contraction, negation and darkness. In the outer world it appears as the property of cohesion which makes the particles of a particular thing hold and cling together and form one self-contained and separate thing. It is the individualizing tendency which permeates the universe and which may be expressed either as a material law in the outer world, or as personal will-tendency in the inner world. The second "quality" is the attractive, gravitating tendency which binds whole with whole as an organizing, universalizing energy. This, again, is both spiritual and physical--it has an outer and an inner aspect. It is a fundamental love-principle in the inner world--the {181} foundation, as Boehme says, of sweetness and warmth and mercy[26]--and at the same time is a structural, organizing law of nature, which tends out of many parts to make one universe.[27] These two diverse tendencies at work eternally in the same world produce strain and tension and _anguish_. The tension occasioned by these opposite forces gives rise to the third "quality," which is a tendency toward movement, oscillation, rotation--what Boehme often calls _the wheel of nature_, or the wheel of motion, or the wheel of life.[28] This, too, is both outer and inner; a law of the physical world and a tendency of spirit. There is nothing in nature that is not ceaselessly moved, and there is no life without its restlessness and anguish, its inward strain and stress, its tension and its problem, its dizzy wheel of life--the perpetual pursuit of a goal which ends at the starting-point as an endless circular process.