rganized
bodies. The other considers electricity as everywhere present, and
penetrating all bodies under the image of a subtile fluid or substance,
which, in Mr. Abernethy's inquiry, I regard as little more than a mere
diagram on his slate, for the purpose of fixing the attention on the
intellectual conception, or as a possible _product_, (in which case
electricity must be a composite power,) or at worst, as words _quae humana
incuria fudit_. This which, in inanimate Nature, is manifested now as
magnetism, now as electricity, and now as chemical agency, is supposed, on
entering an organized body, to constitute its vital _principle_, something
in the same manner as the steam becomes the _mechanic_ power of the
steam-engine, in _consequence_ of its compression by the steam-engine; or
as the breeze that murmurs indistinguishably in the forest becomes the
element, the substratum, of melody in the AEolian harp, and of consummate
harmony in the organ. Now this hypothesis is as directly opposed to my
view as supervention is to evolution, inasmuch as I hold the organized
body itself, in all its marvellous contexture, to be the PRODUCT and
representant of the power which is here supposed to have supervened to it.
So far from admitting a _transfer_, I 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