Page:Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life - Coleridge (1848).djvu/73

 do not admit it even in electricity itself, or in the phenomena universally called electrical; among other points I ground my explanation of remote sympathy on the directly contrary supposition.

But my opinions will be best explained by a rapid exemplification in the processes of Nature, from the first rudiments of individualized life in the lowest classes of its two great poles, the vegetable and animal creation, to its crown and consummation in the human body; thus illustrating at once the unceasing polarity of life, as the form of its process, and its tendency to progressive individuation as the law of its direction.

Among the conceptions, of the mere ideal character of which the philosopher is well aware, and which yet become necessary from the necessity of assuming a beginning; the original fluidity of the planet is the chief. Under some form or other it is expressed or implied in every system of cosmogony and even of geology, from Moses to Thales, and from Thales to Werner. This assumption originates in the same law of mind that gave rise to the prima materia of the Peripatetic school. In order to comprehend and explain the forms of things, we must imagine a state antecedent to form. A chaos of heterogeneous substances, such as our Milton has described, is not only an impossible state (for this may be equally true of every other attempt), but it is palpably impossible. It presupposes, moreover, the thing it is intended to solve; and makes that an effect which had been called in as the explanatory cause. The requisite and only serviceable fiction, therefore, is the representation of as one