But if the conception of an organism be thus the adequate or complete idea of Nature as a whole, that idea is only realised as a third 'power' supervening on, and by means of two subordinate or inferior ranges or 'powers.' The first stage is that occupied by the mathematical and mechanical conception of the world,--the bare skeleton or framework which has to be clothed upon and informed with life and growth. This first 'power' in the world-process of antithetical forces, under the control of, and on the basis supplied by, the original thetic unity which synthetises them, is Matter. In Matter we have the equilibrium and statical indifference of two opposing forces--one centrifugal, accelerating, repulsive, the other contripetal, retarding, attractive--which, working under the synthetising unity supplied by the force of universal gravitation, build up in their momentary arrests or epochs the various material forms. In this first 'power' we have as it were the scheme or machinery through which organisation will work: the outward and 'abstract, organism. And the essential feature of this 'construction' or 'deduction' of matter is that it does not take material atoms and build them into a world, but 'deduces' the properties of matter as issuing from the play of opposing forces, and as due to the temporary syntheses resulting from the presence of unity making itself felt in the opposites. A second and higher 'power' is seen in the physical universe as it presents, itself to the sciences of electricity, magnetism, and chemistry. If the former briefly be denominated the mechanical, this is the chemical world. The law of polarity is here especially prominent: the neutrality or indifference of parts is replaced by an intenser antithesis and affinity: and the return from heterogeneity to homogeneity takes place with more striking and even sudden effect. Here, matter, even as inorganised, has a certain _simulacrum_ of life and sensibility: there is in it the trace of a spirit which emerges above the mere contiguity and juxtaposition of mechanical atoms. The atomic theory shows itself less and less adequate as an attempt to represent the whole phenomena of inanimate matter, and the material universe is already charged with sympathies and antipathies which are full of the promise and the potency of the organic world.