eiteration, 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.

The fourth "quality" is the _flash_, or ignition,