ilating influences of mere _objects_ on
his mind, and who is a prisoner to his own eye and its reflex, the passive
fancy!--not by him in whom an unbroken familiarity with the organic world,
as if it were mechanical, with the sensitive, but as if it were insensate,
has engendered the coarse and hard spirit of a sorcerer. The former is
unable, the latter unwilling, to master the absolute pre-requisites. There
is neither hope nor occasion for him "to cudgel his brains about it, he
has no feeling of the business." If he do not see the necessity from
without, if he have not learned the possibility from within, of
interpenetration, of total intussusception, of the existence of all in
each as the condition of Nature's unity and substantiality, and of the
latency under the predominance of some one power, wherein subsists her
life and its endless variety, as he must be, by habitual slavery to the
eye, or its reflex, the passive fancy, under the influences of the
corpuscularian philosophy, he has so paralysed his imaginative powers as
to be unable--or by that hardness and heart-hardening spirit of contempt,
which is sure to result from a perpetual commune with the lifeless, he has
so far debased his inward being--as to be unwilling to comprehend the
pre-requisite, he must be content, while standing thus at the threshold of
philosophy, to receive the results, though he cannot be admitted to the
deliberation--in other words, to act upon _rules_ which he is incapable of
understanding as LAWS, and to reap the harvest with the sharpened iron for
which others have delved for him in the mine.

It is not improbable that there may exist, and even be discovered, higher
forms and more akin to Life than those of magnetism, electricity, and
constructive (or chemical) affinity appear to be, even in their finest
known influences. It is not improbable that we may hereafter find
ourselves justified in revoking certain of the latter, and unappropriating
them to a yet unnamed triplicity; or that, being thus assisted, we may
obtain a qualitative instead of a quantitative insight into vegetable
animation, as distinct from animal, and that of the insect world from
both. But in the present state of science, the magnetic, electric, and
chemical powers are the last and highest of inorganic nature. These,
therefore, we assume as presenting themselves again to us, in their next
metamorphosis, as reproduction (_i.e._ growth and identity of the whole,
amid th