Page:Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life - Coleridge (1848).djvu/53

 the ingot of gold expressed life, I should answer without hesitation, as the ingot of gold assuredly not, for its form is accidental and ab extra. It may be added to or detracted from without in the least affecting the nature, state, or properties in the specific matter of which the ingot consists. But as gold, as that special union of absolute and of relative gravity, ductility, and hardness, which, wherever they are found, constitute gold, I should answer no less fearlessly, in the affirmative. But I should further add, that of the two counteracting tendencies of nature, namely, that of detachment from the universal life, which universality is represented to us by gravitation, and that of attachment or reduction into it, this and the other noble metals represented the units in which the latter tendency, namely, that of identity with the life of nature, subsisted in the greatest overbalance over the former. It is the form of unity with the least degree of tendency to individuation.

Rising in the ascent, I should take, as illustrative of the second step, the various forms of crystals as a union, not of powers only, but of parts, and as the simplest forms of composition in the next narrowest sphere of affinity. Here the form, or apparent quantity, is manifestly the result of the quality, and the chemist himself not seldom admits them as infallible characters of the substances united in the whole of a given crystal.

In the first step, we had Life, as the mere unity of powers; in the second we have the simplest forms of totality evolved. The third step is presented to us in those vast formations, the tracing of which generically would form the science of Geology, or its history in the