_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 CHAOS as one vast homogeneous drop! In this sense it may be even
justified, as an appropriate symbol of the great fundamental truth that
all things spring from, and subsist in, the endless strife between
indifference and difference. The whole history of Nature is comprised in
the specification of the transitional states from the one to the other.
The symbol only is fictitious: the thing signified is not only grounded in
truth--it is the law and actuating principle of all other truths, whether
physical or intellectual.

Now, by magnetism in its widest sense, I mean the first and simplest
_differential_ act of Nature, as the power which works in _length_, and
produces the first distinction between the indistinguishable by the
generation of a _line_. Relatively, therefore, to fluidity, that is, to
matter, the parts of which cannot be distinguished from each other by
figure, magnetism is the power of fixity; but, relatively to itself,
magnetism, like every other power in Nature, is designated by its opposite
poles, and must be represented as the magnetic axis, the northern pole of
which signifies rest, attraction, fixity, coherence, or hardness; the
element of EARTH in the nomenclature of _observation_ and the CARBONIC
principle in that of _experiment_; while the southern pole, as its
antithesis, represents mobility, repulsion, incoherence, and fusibility;
the element of air in the nomenclature of observation (that is, of Nature
as it appears to us when unquestioned by art), and azote or nitrogen in
the nomenclature of experiment (that is, of Nature in the state so
beautifully allegorized in the Homeric fable of Proteus bound down, and
forced to answer by Ulysses, after having been pursued through all his
metamorphoses into his ultimate form.(14)) That nothing real does or can
exist corresponding to either pole _exclusively_, is involved in the very
definition of a THING as the synthesis of opposing energies. That a thing
_is_, is owing to the co-inherence therein of any two powers; but that it